It has been widely recognized that poor health is an important cause of poverty, especiallyamong the low- and middle- income countries. One of the reasons is the absence of publicfinancial protection against the medical consumption risk in these countries. This Phd dissertationis dedicated to discern the role that health insurance could play in the organization of healthfinancial protection system. The dissertation is composed of two parts. The first part discusses theproblems linking to the financing to medical consumption from a global point of view. Chapter 1brings theoretical discussions on three topics: 1) the specialties of medical consumption risks andthe difficulties in using private health insurance to manage medical consumption risks. 2) Therole of government and market in the distribution of health resources. 3) The options for theorganization of health financing system. Chapter 2 conducts a statistical comparison on theperformance of health financing systems in the countries of different social-Economic background.The discussion is carried out around three aspects of health financing: the availability of resources,the organization of health financing, and the coverage of financial protection. The second part ofthe dissertation studies the evolution of heath financing system in a specific country: China. Threechapters are assigned to this part. Chapter 3 introduces the history of Chinese health financingsystem since 1950s. It helps us to understand the challenges in health financing brought byeconomic reform. Chapter 4 carries out an empirical study on the distribution of health financingburden in China in the 1990s. It illustrates the direct results of the decline of public financing andincrease of direct payment. Chapter 5 presents health insurance reform that launched by thegovernment since the end of 1990s. An impact analysis is conducted on an original dataset of 24township hospitals in Weifang prefecture in the north of the China. The objective is to estimatethe impact of the implementation of New Rural Medical Cooperation System (NRMCS) on theactivities and financial structure of township hospitals. At last, we conclude that social healthinsurance (SHI) permits a sharing of health financial responsibilities between the service provider,the patient-Consumer, and the service purchaser. It can not only involve both public and privateagents into the collection of funds for health financing system, but also make each party moreaccountable due to the risks they bear from the result of medical consumption. Meanwhile it isnecessary to note that SHI is just one option among others to organize health financing system.The implementation of SHI requires a certain level of social-Economic development. SHI does notsystematically bring better performance on health financing if it is not accompanied by thereforms on provider payment or on service delivery system. Government commitment andinstitutional capacity are also key factors for the good function of the system. ; Il est admis qu'avoir une mauvaise santé est une des causes principales de pauvreté,particulièrement dans les pays à faible et moyen revenus. Une des raisons de ce constat est une absence de protection financière. L'objectif de cette thèse est de discerner le rôle que l'assurance maladie pourrait jouer dans l'organisation du système de protection financière de la santé. La thèse se compose de deux parties. La première partie aborde les problèmes liés au financement de santé d'un point de vue global. Le chapitre 1 apporte des discussions théoriques sur trois thèmes: 1) les spécificités des risques de la consommation médicale qui rendent la gestion du risque par l'assurance maladie privé difficile, 2) le rôle du gouvernement et du marché dans la répartition des ressources de santé. 3) les options pour l'organisation du financement de la santé. Le chapitre 2 présente une comparaison statistique sur la performance des systèmes de financement de la santé entre des pays à contextes socio-Économique différents. Les discussions sont menées autour de trois aspects du financement de la santé: la disponibilité des ressources,l'organisation du financement de la santé, et la couverture de la protection financière. La deuxième partie qui comporte trois chapitres étudie l'évolution du système de financement de la santé dans un pays donné: la Chine. Le chapitre 3 présente l'histoire du système de financement de la santé en Chine depuis 1950. Il nous aide à comprendre les défis dans le financement de la santé suscités par la réforme économique. Le chapitre 4 porte sur une étude empirique de la répartition de la charge financière de la santé en Chine dans les années 1990. Il illustre les résultats directs de la baisse du financement public et de l'augmentation des paiements directs sur le bienêtre de la population. Le chapitre 5 présente la réforme de l'assurance maladie lancée par le gouvernement depuis la fin des années 1990. L'objectif est d'estimer l'impact de la mise en oeuvre du nouveau système rural d'assurance médical (NRMCS) sur les activités et la structure financière de ces hôpitaux. Une analyse d'impact est réalisée sur un échantillon de 24 hôpitaux dans la préfecture de Weifang, au Nord de la Chine. Nous concluons que le système d'assurance maladie permet un partage des responsabilités financières entre prestataires de services, patient consommateurs et acheteurs de services. Elle inclut à la fois les agents publics et privés dans la contribution au financement de santé, ce qui rend chaque partie plus responsable vis-À-Vis de son comportement en raison des risques qu'il doit assumer du fait de la consommation médicale.Cependant, il est nécessaire de noter que l'assurance maladie sociale n'est qu'une option parmi d'autres systèmes de financement de la santé. La mise en oeuvre de ce système exige un certain niveau de développement socio-Économique. L'assurance maladie ne conduit pas systématiquement à une meilleure performance du financement de la santé si elle n'est pas accompagnée de réformes quant au paiement au fournisseur ou au système de prestation de services. L'engagement du gouvernement et des capacités institutionnelles sont également des facteurs clés pour le bon fonctionnement du système.
One of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese land system is the existence of a 'zero state' withregard to land institutions: all the country's existing land institutions were put in place in the last25 to 30 years. However, this does not mean that there is no history of such bodies; indeed, thosethat are now emerging carry the traces of each past period. The many local customary institutionsreflect the principles underpinning previous systems regulating the social and spatial distributionof resources, and elements of the French land tenure system can be seen in the decision to registerland ownership certificates rather than follow the more Anglo Saxon system of using the titlesthemselves as proof of ownership. Nevertheless, there is a clear synchronic dimension to theprocess of putting land institutions in place, which is reflected in the role it has played in theprofound transformation of the Vietnamese State and society.In the first stage of this process, between 1979 and 1993, one of the primary concerns in designingland institutions was to respond to the high expectations of a deeply rural society without makingland an autonomous domain. This period saw the progressive dissolution of the cooperativesthrough the withdrawal of their land prerogatives. Moving in incremental stages, the State firstrecognised individuals and households as potential land users (with Decree 100, Decree 10 andthe Land Law of 1989), although land use rights were still limited and defined within cooperativesthrough temporary contracts between the cooperatives, which still held delegated managementrights, and these new users. This stage ended with the Land Law of 1993 which, while not openlychallenging the cooperatives, paved the way for their disappearance by recognising thatindividuals and households had fundamental derived management rights in addition to the right touse agricultural lands (rights to exchange, assign, rent, bequeath and mortgage land) for relativelylong fixed periods. This gave them significant control over land while dispossessing thecooperatives of any real land management capacities. Since these rights are associated with userights, it was not the land that could be transferred or mortgaged, but the right to use it and enjoyits produce. However, the very existence of these rights and their fairly long-term allocation tohouseholds meant that a land market could develop, and that land tenure seemed to function onthe basis of private ownership, even if it was not characterised as such.The second stage was a transition facilitating the 'smooth' passage from a land tenure systemdesigned to meet the needs of the rural population to one that could support the drive to makeVietnam a modern industrial and urban country. This stage roughly corresponded to the decadeseparating the land laws of 1993 and 2003. In this period, the State did little to the rights assignedto individuals and households and hardly changed agricultural land tenure. It did, however,endeavour to put in place the land administration, for which it created an independent organ at theministerial level in 1994, the General Department of Land Administration (GDLA). For the firsttime, this brought together its decision-making, operational and technical dimensions (the formerGeneral department of land management created in 1979, and the former National department ofsurveys and cartography), demonstrating the government's willingness to make this anautonomous domain that carried some weight. The State also progressively regulated modes ofaccess to urban, industrial and commercial lands and increased the rights assigned to privateenterprise, thus paving the way for the changes in the next period (albeit rather haphazardly bygenerating a growing number of texts).The third stage started with a reform of the land administration in 2002 and the publication of anew Land Law in 2003. Land was now becoming a tool to develop the territory forindustrialisation and urbanisation. This was made clear by the law of 2003, which incorporatedregulations from the previous period and barely touched on rural affairs. Little was done tomodify access to agricultural and forest lands, which had been regulated in 1993, or provide moreflexible access for rural households. But the other categories of land and land users – some ofwhom appeared in legislation for the first time – occupied a growing and even dominant place inthe law. Thus, the new legislation was full of arrangements to facilitate industrial and commercialinvestments by private and foreign enterprises, and allowed for the development of markets forland and land use rights. It also specified procedures for cataloguing and planning land use. Whileland use planning remained a top-down procedure steered by the Land Office at different levels,the legislation made the planning process much more flexible by extending the provinces'prerogatives and enabling the infra-provincial administrative authorities to change the status oflands.Since 2002, land issues have both multiplied and intensified on several levels. The partial andpoorly managed decentralisation of land management increased the shortcomings and tensionsbetween the central and provincial levels. On the one hand, the Land Office, which had beensubstantially modernised and was responsible for planning at every level, had never had as muchpotential power. This certainly rattled the central government and probably prompted its demotionin 2002 from a ministry to part of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE).On the other hand, the provinces have used even greater rifts within the administrative system tolessen the constraints of centralised planning and work very broadly with the legislation in orderto respond to local expectations, and especially those of private interests. The increasingprivatisation of land has been another point of tension. Since the Constitution of 1959, the Statehas owned all land in the name of the entire population, and while individual land rights haveconstantly been extended, individuals are assigned rights of use and management. However, thegrowing number of recognised users, more flexible conditions of access to land and theprogressive extension of rights associated with use rights have allowed private national andforeign enterprises to become dominant land actors – hence the spectacular growth in the numberand size of landholdings reserved for industrial, commercial, real-estate and leisure projects,especially in peri-urban areas.The creation of 'land fund development organisations' in 2004 is symptomatic of the problemsposed by redefing the role of the provinces and private investors. Modes of expropriation are arecurrent problem with investments, and especially compensation for those whose use rights havebeen expropriated. This issue was only settled recently, and has been treated on a case-by-casebasis by the provinces or the Land Office. The Law of 2003 still presents the State as the principalactor in land distribution insofar as it is the authority that requisitions land in order to immediatelyreallocate it to investors. However, the State has disengaged from transactions since 2004,creating a new, State-mandated body to intervene when lands are repossessed: 'land funddevelopment organisations' whose task is to simplify procedures for investors by offering them asingle interface, managing the funds from land recovered by the State in accordance withdecisions by the competent bodies, and preparing these lands for reallocation to investors.However, the exact status of these organisations, which are not commercial but also not totallypublic, is somewhat unclear. They are not financially autonomous, they are not mandatory, andtheir form and level of competence fluctuates as they can operate at the district or the provinciallevel. This lack of clarity, which results in the creation of bodies whose nature varies fromprovince to province, suggests that the State is trying to divest itself of the highly sensitiveproblem of expropriations at the expense of their beneficiaries, rather than seeking to resolve it inthe long term.What is the explanation for this disengagement, given that the problems created by the way thatland is expropriated for investment projects are some of the thorniest and most intractable for theauthorities in Hanoi? One reason is probably the increasing complexity of land management, andthe human and financial resources that can be devolved to the administration to carry out the tasksit habeen assigned. These are very substantial needs, especially at the lowest echelons(communes, districts) where staff usually have little or no training. But the State's disengagementcannot be entirely ascribed to these technical and financial challenges; it is also a manifestation ofthe difficulties of addressing two very different priorities: leading Vietnam towards modernity bytransforming it into an industrial and urban country, and organising a fragile and numericallysuperior rural population with a long habit of socialist values. One of the factors currentlyexecerbating the question of expropriation is the fact that agricultural and forested lands havebeen kept in a relatively isolated state of suspension for the last 15 years. One would assume thatthe State has a duty to protect these lands (and their users), but it is actually making them morevulnerable to the dynamics of urban and/or non-agricultural land use (industrial and commercial,leisure, etc.).Agricultural land has been subject to various changes since 1993, but access to such land is stillhighly regulated. Maintaining a ceiling on the amount of land and duration of the rights allocatedlimits the process of land accumulation and ensures that the rural population has egalitarian accessto land. By the same token, households that have been allocated rights to agricultural land by theState do not have to pay tax on this land, whose value is set according to the value of itsagricultural produce rather than the price of adjacent lands (market price). Although this shouldmean that such land remains accessible even to poor rural households, this specific status, andespecially that of highly protected rice-producing land, works against rural households bytrapping them in small, low-value farms and weakening their position when private and/or nonagriculturalinterests come into play. It seems that rather than being protected, agriculturalhouseholds – along with agriculture itself – are being sacrificed to industrialisation andurbanisation.However, things are not as simple as the last few lines suggest. On the one hand, ruralhouseholds' situations vary greatly from region to region, and there are cases where they may beprotected by modes of access to agricultural and forested land, especially the most vulnerablehouseholds. Recent events, and the global food crisis in particular, have reminded Vietnam thatthere is still a role for agriculture and rural producers, and once again put the question of ruralland under the spotlight. In response to this crisis (and soaring rice prices), the governmentdecided to freeze more than one million hectares of rice fields and launch a campaign reaffirmingthe value of rural areas in relation to urban areas (the 'three nong'). It is too early to know whetherthe return to 'rural values' in 2008 will have a lasting impact on agricultural land, and exactlywhat this impact will be. But the decisions that have been taken show that agricultural land stillconstitutes a lever that the government will not hesitate to use when the need arises. For certainnational officials, agricultural land remains a strong symbol of socialism, and its regulation acrucial element of social peace in what is still a largely rural society with close attachments to theland. Agricultural land is also an issue that raises questions about the State's role in the movetowards 'market socialism', and the legitimacy of the Communist Party. While the State'sindecision (or approximations) with regard to land matters could be interpreted as evidence of acertain pragmatism and determination to work with the legacy of the socialist period, recentdevelopments in this domain are testing the very foundations of the Communist Party'slegitimacy, and it could try to deflect this threat by getting the government to maintain the specificstatus of rural land. So is Vietnam heading towards a two-tier system where some land – the vastblock of agricultural and forest lands allocated free of charge – continues to be managed bycentral government in the nation's interest, while other agricultural land can be mobilised atleisure and managed under a liberal regime in order to support the country's economicdevelopment?In order to answer this question we needed to turn to the land actors and seek their opinions. Themajority of foreign actors (who were historically excluded from this sensitive strategic domainand whose involvement is therefore relatively recent) view the reform as incomplete and thus amajor cause of corruption. They are pushing to divest the law of these 'socialist archaisms' andmake it even more liberal. As recently as March 2008 the World Bank, which some see as theglobal symbol of liberalism, and which had until then deliberately avoided land matters, signed upto the highly ambitious Land Administration Project, making it the lead foreign actor in thisdomain and giving a strong indication of the direction in which land affairs are heading. However,the positions expressed by various national land actors are much less clear. On the one hand,officials in the land administration in particular take a fairly technical approach to land: their mainconcern is the effectiveness of the administration and legislation, and making land an autonomousdomain. Officials working directly with foreign experts tend to take a 'top-down' approach,looking at the development of the whole country and seeing the constraints associated with theprocesses of urbanisation, industrialisation and increasing openness. On the other hand, some ofthe actors we spoke to from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) see landas something that cannot be detached from local and sectoral contexts. Therefore, they believethat agricultural land should respond to the needs of agriculture and rural populations, while forestland should primarily respond to environmental protection objectives. At the moment the firstgroup of actors is much more influential because of their strategic position within the landadministration and support from international cooperation; however, in the current economicclimate the question of agriculture and rural areas and populations has re-emerged as a priorityand is slowing the pace of liberalisation.So far there is no indication that agricultural land will be able to take account of the specificitiesand great diversity of rural areas, whether or not it is prioritised, planned or liberalised.Agricultural land tenure is controlled by the State, and characterised more by the numerousconstraints that it imposes (categories, temporal and spatial limits, etc.) than its capacity to adaptto the problems facing the country's rural populations, agricultural practices and environment.Liberalising agricultural land tenure would bring it closer to a system of individual ownership,which would make land legislation more onerous in many settings where local rights of access toresources are not managed in this way. The Land Law of 2003 introduced several innovations thatare helpful in this respect, mainly by creating a new category of users, 'residential communities',which allows groups to collectively hold use rights to unlimited amounts of agricultural and forestland that they are allocated free of charge for unlimited periods. However, this new measure isitself very restrictive in terms of what constitutes a 'community', the procedures it entails and theframework it imposes on collective management. So what place do customary land tenure systemshave in the emerging land system? Vietnamese land institutions seem to have made little or noattempt to plan for this; and the main reason why there are still such diverse local situationsappears to be the government's hesitant approach to agricultural land tenure. The co-existence ofactors with divergent positions on this question and on the role of the State, and the relativeabandonment of the rural world (especially remote rural areas) because it is not consideredimportant as long it doesn't challenge the objectives of urbanisation and industrialisation have lefta gap where customary systems can continue to function. The recent resurgence of interest in thisdomain could revive the debate about systems that are considered incompatible with theestablishment of a modern State, either because of agricultural practices such as slash-and-burn orthe functioning of longstanding local power systems, but customary systems will continue tosurvive as long as efforts to develop intensive, industrial-type agriculture are not sustainedeffectively across the country.
One of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese land system is the existence of a 'zero state' withregard to land institutions: all the country's existing land institutions were put in place in the last25 to 30 years. However, this does not mean that there is no history of such bodies; indeed, thosethat are now emerging carry the traces of each past period. The many local customary institutionsreflect the principles underpinning previous systems regulating the social and spatial distributionof resources, and elements of the French land tenure system can be seen in the decision to registerland ownership certificates rather than follow the more Anglo Saxon system of using the titlesthemselves as proof of ownership. Nevertheless, there is a clear synchronic dimension to theprocess of putting land institutions in place, which is reflected in the role it has played in theprofound transformation of the Vietnamese State and society.In the first stage of this process, between 1979 and 1993, one of the primary concerns in designingland institutions was to respond to the high expectations of a deeply rural society without makingland an autonomous domain. This period saw the progressive dissolution of the cooperativesthrough the withdrawal of their land prerogatives. Moving in incremental stages, the State firstrecognised individuals and households as potential land users (with Decree 100, Decree 10 andthe Land Law of 1989), although land use rights were still limited and defined within cooperativesthrough temporary contracts between the cooperatives, which still held delegated managementrights, and these new users. This stage ended with the Land Law of 1993 which, while not openlychallenging the cooperatives, paved the way for their disappearance by recognising thatindividuals and households had fundamental derived management rights in addition to the right touse agricultural lands (rights to exchange, assign, rent, bequeath and mortgage land) for relativelylong fixed periods. This gave them significant control over land while dispossessing thecooperatives of any real land management capacities. Since these rights are associated with userights, it was not the land that could be transferred or mortgaged, but the right to use it and enjoyits produce. However, the very existence of these rights and their fairly long-term allocation tohouseholds meant that a land market could develop, and that land tenure seemed to function onthe basis of private ownership, even if it was not characterised as such.The second stage was a transition facilitating the 'smooth' passage from a land tenure systemdesigned to meet the needs of the rural population to one that could support the drive to makeVietnam a modern industrial and urban country. This stage roughly corresponded to the decadeseparating the land laws of 1993 and 2003. In this period, the State did little to the rights assignedto individuals and households and hardly changed agricultural land tenure. It did, however,endeavour to put in place the land administration, for which it created an independent organ at theministerial level in 1994, the General Department of Land Administration (GDLA). For the firsttime, this brought together its decision-making, operational and technical dimensions (the formerGeneral department of land management created in 1979, and the former National department ofsurveys and cartography), demonstrating the government's willingness to make this anautonomous domain that carried some weight. The State also progressively regulated modes ofaccess to urban, industrial and commercial lands and increased the rights assigned to privateenterprise, thus paving the way for the changes in the next period (albeit rather haphazardly bygenerating a growing number of texts).The third stage started with a reform of the land administration in 2002 and the publication of anew Land Law in 2003. Land was now becoming a tool to develop the territory forindustrialisation and urbanisation. This was made clear by the law of 2003, which incorporatedregulations from the previous period and barely touched on rural affairs. Little was done tomodify access to agricultural and forest lands, which had been regulated in 1993, or provide moreflexible access for rural households. But the other categories of land and land users – some ofwhom appeared in legislation for the first time – occupied a growing and even dominant place inthe law. Thus, the new legislation was full of arrangements to facilitate industrial and commercialinvestments by private and foreign enterprises, and allowed for the development of markets forland and land use rights. It also specified procedures for cataloguing and planning land use. Whileland use planning remained a top-down procedure steered by the Land Office at different levels,the legislation made the planning process much more flexible by extending the provinces'prerogatives and enabling the infra-provincial administrative authorities to change the status oflands.Since 2002, land issues have both multiplied and intensified on several levels. The partial andpoorly managed decentralisation of land management increased the shortcomings and tensionsbetween the central and provincial levels. On the one hand, the Land Office, which had beensubstantially modernised and was responsible for planning at every level, had never had as muchpotential power. This certainly rattled the central government and probably prompted its demotionin 2002 from a ministry to part of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE).On the other hand, the provinces have used even greater rifts within the administrative system tolessen the constraints of centralised planning and work very broadly with the legislation in orderto respond to local expectations, and especially those of private interests. The increasingprivatisation of land has been another point of tension. Since the Constitution of 1959, the Statehas owned all land in the name of the entire population, and while individual land rights haveconstantly been extended, individuals are assigned rights of use and management. However, thegrowing number of recognised users, more flexible conditions of access to land and theprogressive extension of rights associated with use rights have allowed private national andforeign enterprises to become dominant land actors – hence the spectacular growth in the numberand size of landholdings reserved for industrial, commercial, real-estate and leisure projects,especially in peri-urban areas.The creation of 'land fund development organisations' in 2004 is symptomatic of the problemsposed by redefing the role of the provinces and private investors. Modes of expropriation are arecurrent problem with investments, and especially compensation for those whose use rights havebeen expropriated. This issue was only settled recently, and has been treated on a case-by-casebasis by the provinces or the Land Office. The Law of 2003 still presents the State as the principalactor in land distribution insofar as it is the authority that requisitions land in order to immediatelyreallocate it to investors. However, the State has disengaged from transactions since 2004,creating a new, State-mandated body to intervene when lands are repossessed: 'land funddevelopment organisations' whose task is to simplify procedures for investors by offering them asingle interface, managing the funds from land recovered by the State in accordance withdecisions by the competent bodies, and preparing these lands for reallocation to investors.However, the exact status of these organisations, which are not commercial but also not totallypublic, is somewhat unclear. They are not financially autonomous, they are not mandatory, andtheir form and level of competence fluctuates as they can operate at the district or the provinciallevel. This lack of clarity, which results in the creation of bodies whose nature varies fromprovince to province, suggests that the State is trying to divest itself of the highly sensitiveproblem of expropriations at the expense of their beneficiaries, rather than seeking to resolve it inthe long term.What is the explanation for this disengagement, given that the problems created by the way thatland is expropriated for investment projects are some of the thorniest and most intractable for theauthorities in Hanoi? One reason is probably the increasing complexity of land management, andthe human and financial resources that can be devolved to the administration to carry out the tasksit habeen assigned. These are very substantial needs, especially at the lowest echelons(communes, districts) where staff usually have little or no training. But the State's disengagementcannot be entirely ascribed to these technical and financial challenges; it is also a manifestation ofthe difficulties of addressing two very different priorities: leading Vietnam towards modernity bytransforming it into an industrial and urban country, and organising a fragile and numericallysuperior rural population with a long habit of socialist values. One of the factors currentlyexecerbating the question of expropriation is the fact that agricultural and forested lands havebeen kept in a relatively isolated state of suspension for the last 15 years. One would assume thatthe State has a duty to protect these lands (and their users), but it is actually making them morevulnerable to the dynamics of urban and/or non-agricultural land use (industrial and commercial,leisure, etc.).Agricultural land has been subject to various changes since 1993, but access to such land is stillhighly regulated. Maintaining a ceiling on the amount of land and duration of the rights allocatedlimits the process of land accumulation and ensures that the rural population has egalitarian accessto land. By the same token, households that have been allocated rights to agricultural land by theState do not have to pay tax on this land, whose value is set according to the value of itsagricultural produce rather than the price of adjacent lands (market price). Although this shouldmean that such land remains accessible even to poor rural households, this specific status, andespecially that of highly protected rice-producing land, works against rural households bytrapping them in small, low-value farms and weakening their position when private and/or nonagriculturalinterests come into play. It seems that rather than being protected, agriculturalhouseholds – along with agriculture itself – are being sacrificed to industrialisation andurbanisation.However, things are not as simple as the last few lines suggest. On the one hand, ruralhouseholds' situations vary greatly from region to region, and there are cases where they may beprotected by modes of access to agricultural and forested land, especially the most vulnerablehouseholds. Recent events, and the global food crisis in particular, have reminded Vietnam thatthere is still a role for agriculture and rural producers, and once again put the question of ruralland under the spotlight. In response to this crisis (and soaring rice prices), the governmentdecided to freeze more than one million hectares of rice fields and launch a campaign reaffirmingthe value of rural areas in relation to urban areas (the 'three nong'). It is too early to know whetherthe return to 'rural values' in 2008 will have a lasting impact on agricultural land, and exactlywhat this impact will be. But the decisions that have been taken show that agricultural land stillconstitutes a lever that the government will not hesitate to use when the need arises. For certainnational officials, agricultural land remains a strong symbol of socialism, and its regulation acrucial element of social peace in what is still a largely rural society with close attachments to theland. Agricultural land is also an issue that raises questions about the State's role in the movetowards 'market socialism', and the legitimacy of the Communist Party. While the State'sindecision (or approximations) with regard to land matters could be interpreted as evidence of acertain pragmatism and determination to work with the legacy of the socialist period, recentdevelopments in this domain are testing the very foundations of the Communist Party'slegitimacy, and it could try to deflect this threat by getting the government to maintain the specificstatus of rural land. So is Vietnam heading towards a two-tier system where some land – the vastblock of agricultural and forest lands allocated free of charge – continues to be managed bycentral government in the nation's interest, while other agricultural land can be mobilised atleisure and managed under a liberal regime in order to support the country's economicdevelopment?In order to answer this question we needed to turn to the land actors and seek their opinions. Themajority of foreign actors (who were historically excluded from this sensitive strategic domainand whose involvement is therefore relatively recent) view the reform as incomplete and thus amajor cause of corruption. They are pushing to divest the law of these 'socialist archaisms' andmake it even more liberal. As recently as March 2008 the World Bank, which some see as theglobal symbol of liberalism, and which had until then deliberately avoided land matters, signed upto the highly ambitious Land Administration Project, making it the lead foreign actor in thisdomain and giving a strong indication of the direction in which land affairs are heading. However,the positions expressed by various national land actors are much less clear. On the one hand,officials in the land administration in particular take a fairly technical approach to land: their mainconcern is the effectiveness of the administration and legislation, and making land an autonomousdomain. Officials working directly with foreign experts tend to take a 'top-down' approach,looking at the development of the whole country and seeing the constraints associated with theprocesses of urbanisation, industrialisation and increasing openness. On the other hand, some ofthe actors we spoke to from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) see landas something that cannot be detached from local and sectoral contexts. Therefore, they believethat agricultural land should respond to the needs of agriculture and rural populations, while forestland should primarily respond to environmental protection objectives. At the moment the firstgroup of actors is much more influential because of their strategic position within the landadministration and support from international cooperation; however, in the current economicclimate the question of agriculture and rural areas and populations has re-emerged as a priorityand is slowing the pace of liberalisation.So far there is no indication that agricultural land will be able to take account of the specificitiesand great diversity of rural areas, whether or not it is prioritised, planned or liberalised.Agricultural land tenure is controlled by the State, and characterised more by the numerousconstraints that it imposes (categories, temporal and spatial limits, etc.) than its capacity to adaptto the problems facing the country's rural populations, agricultural practices and environment.Liberalising agricultural land tenure would bring it closer to a system of individual ownership,which would make land legislation more onerous in many settings where local rights of access toresources are not managed in this way. The Land Law of 2003 introduced several innovations thatare helpful in this respect, mainly by creating a new category of users, 'residential communities',which allows groups to collectively hold use rights to unlimited amounts of agricultural and forestland that they are allocated free of charge for unlimited periods. However, this new measure isitself very restrictive in terms of what constitutes a 'community', the procedures it entails and theframework it imposes on collective management. So what place do customary land tenure systemshave in the emerging land system? Vietnamese land institutions seem to have made little or noattempt to plan for this; and the main reason why there are still such diverse local situationsappears to be the government's hesitant approach to agricultural land tenure. The co-existence ofactors with divergent positions on this question and on the role of the State, and the relativeabandonment of the rural world (especially remote rural areas) because it is not consideredimportant as long it doesn't challenge the objectives of urbanisation and industrialisation have lefta gap where customary systems can continue to function. The recent resurgence of interest in thisdomain could revive the debate about systems that are considered incompatible with theestablishment of a modern State, either because of agricultural practices such as slash-and-burn orthe functioning of longstanding local power systems, but customary systems will continue tosurvive as long as efforts to develop intensive, industrial-type agriculture are not sustainedeffectively across the country.
One of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese land system is the existence of a 'zero state' withregard to land institutions: all the country's existing land institutions were put in place in the last25 to 30 years. However, this does not mean that there is no history of such bodies; indeed, thosethat are now emerging carry the traces of each past period. The many local customary institutionsreflect the principles underpinning previous systems regulating the social and spatial distributionof resources, and elements of the French land tenure system can be seen in the decision to registerland ownership certificates rather than follow the more Anglo Saxon system of using the titlesthemselves as proof of ownership. Nevertheless, there is a clear synchronic dimension to theprocess of putting land institutions in place, which is reflected in the role it has played in theprofound transformation of the Vietnamese State and society.In the first stage of this process, between 1979 and 1993, one of the primary concerns in designingland institutions was to respond to the high expectations of a deeply rural society without makingland an autonomous domain. This period saw the progressive dissolution of the cooperativesthrough the withdrawal of their land prerogatives. Moving in incremental stages, the State firstrecognised individuals and households as potential land users (with Decree 100, Decree 10 andthe Land Law of 1989), although land use rights were still limited and defined within cooperativesthrough temporary contracts between the cooperatives, which still held delegated managementrights, and these new users. This stage ended with the Land Law of 1993 which, while not openlychallenging the cooperatives, paved the way for their disappearance by recognising thatindividuals and households had fundamental derived management rights in addition to the right touse agricultural lands (rights to exchange, assign, rent, bequeath and mortgage land) for relativelylong fixed periods. This gave them significant control over land while dispossessing thecooperatives of any real land management capacities. Since these rights are associated with userights, it was not the land that could be transferred or mortgaged, but the right to use it and enjoyits produce. However, the very existence of these rights and their fairly long-term allocation tohouseholds meant that a land market could develop, and that land tenure seemed to function onthe basis of private ownership, even if it was not characterised as such.The second stage was a transition facilitating the 'smooth' passage from a land tenure systemdesigned to meet the needs of the rural population to one that could support the drive to makeVietnam a modern industrial and urban country. This stage roughly corresponded to the decadeseparating the land laws of 1993 and 2003. In this period, the State did little to the rights assignedto individuals and households and hardly changed agricultural land tenure. It did, however,endeavour to put in place the land administration, for which it created an independent organ at theministerial level in 1994, the General Department of Land Administration (GDLA). For the firsttime, this brought together its decision-making, operational and technical dimensions (the formerGeneral department of land management created in 1979, and the former National department ofsurveys and cartography), demonstrating the government's willingness to make this anautonomous domain that carried some weight. The State also progressively regulated modes ofaccess to urban, industrial and commercial lands and increased the rights assigned to privateenterprise, thus paving the way for the changes in the next period (albeit rather haphazardly bygenerating a growing number of texts).The third stage started with a reform of the land administration in 2002 and the publication of anew Land Law in 2003. Land was now becoming a tool to develop the territory forindustrialisation and urbanisation. This was made clear by the law of 2003, which incorporatedregulations from the previous period and barely touched on rural affairs. Little was done tomodify access to agricultural and forest lands, which had been regulated in 1993, or provide moreflexible access for rural households. But the other categories of land and land users – some ofwhom appeared in legislation for the first time – occupied a growing and even dominant place inthe law. Thus, the new legislation was full of arrangements to facilitate industrial and commercialinvestments by private and foreign enterprises, and allowed for the development of markets forland and land use rights. It also specified procedures for cataloguing and planning land use. Whileland use planning remained a top-down procedure steered by the Land Office at different levels,the legislation made the planning process much more flexible by extending the provinces'prerogatives and enabling the infra-provincial administrative authorities to change the status oflands.Since 2002, land issues have both multiplied and intensified on several levels. The partial andpoorly managed decentralisation of land management increased the shortcomings and tensionsbetween the central and provincial levels. On the one hand, the Land Office, which had beensubstantially modernised and was responsible for planning at every level, had never had as muchpotential power. This certainly rattled the central government and probably prompted its demotionin 2002 from a ministry to part of the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment (MoNRE).On the other hand, the provinces have used even greater rifts within the administrative system tolessen the constraints of centralised planning and work very broadly with the legislation in orderto respond to local expectations, and especially those of private interests. The increasingprivatisation of land has been another point of tension. Since the Constitution of 1959, the Statehas owned all land in the name of the entire population, and while individual land rights haveconstantly been extended, individuals are assigned rights of use and management. However, thegrowing number of recognised users, more flexible conditions of access to land and theprogressive extension of rights associated with use rights have allowed private national andforeign enterprises to become dominant land actors – hence the spectacular growth in the numberand size of landholdings reserved for industrial, commercial, real-estate and leisure projects,especially in peri-urban areas.The creation of 'land fund development organisations' in 2004 is symptomatic of the problemsposed by redefing the role of the provinces and private investors. Modes of expropriation are arecurrent problem with investments, and especially compensation for those whose use rights havebeen expropriated. This issue was only settled recently, and has been treated on a case-by-casebasis by the provinces or the Land Office. The Law of 2003 still presents the State as the principalactor in land distribution insofar as it is the authority that requisitions land in order to immediatelyreallocate it to investors. However, the State has disengaged from transactions since 2004,creating a new, State-mandated body to intervene when lands are repossessed: 'land funddevelopment organisations' whose task is to simplify procedures for investors by offering them asingle interface, managing the funds from land recovered by the State in accordance withdecisions by the competent bodies, and preparing these lands for reallocation to investors.However, the exact status of these organisations, which are not commercial but also not totallypublic, is somewhat unclear. They are not financially autonomous, they are not mandatory, andtheir form and level of competence fluctuates as they can operate at the district or the provinciallevel. This lack of clarity, which results in the creation of bodies whose nature varies fromprovince to province, suggests that the State is trying to divest itself of the highly sensitiveproblem of expropriations at the expense of their beneficiaries, rather than seeking to resolve it inthe long term.What is the explanation for this disengagement, given that the problems created by the way thatland is expropriated for investment projects are some of the thorniest and most intractable for theauthorities in Hanoi? One reason is probably the increasing complexity of land management, andthe human and financial resources that can be devolved to the administration to carry out the tasksit habeen assigned. These are very substantial needs, especially at the lowest echelons(communes, districts) where staff usually have little or no training. But the State's disengagementcannot be entirely ascribed to these technical and financial challenges; it is also a manifestation ofthe difficulties of addressing two very different priorities: leading Vietnam towards modernity bytransforming it into an industrial and urban country, and organising a fragile and numericallysuperior rural population with a long habit of socialist values. One of the factors currentlyexecerbating the question of expropriation is the fact that agricultural and forested lands havebeen kept in a relatively isolated state of suspension for the last 15 years. One would assume thatthe State has a duty to protect these lands (and their users), but it is actually making them morevulnerable to the dynamics of urban and/or non-agricultural land use (industrial and commercial,leisure, etc.).Agricultural land has been subject to various changes since 1993, but access to such land is stillhighly regulated. Maintaining a ceiling on the amount of land and duration of the rights allocatedlimits the process of land accumulation and ensures that the rural population has egalitarian accessto land. By the same token, households that have been allocated rights to agricultural land by theState do not have to pay tax on this land, whose value is set according to the value of itsagricultural produce rather than the price of adjacent lands (market price). Although this shouldmean that such land remains accessible even to poor rural households, this specific status, andespecially that of highly protected rice-producing land, works against rural households bytrapping them in small, low-value farms and weakening their position when private and/or nonagriculturalinterests come into play. It seems that rather than being protected, agriculturalhouseholds – along with agriculture itself – are being sacrificed to industrialisation andurbanisation.However, things are not as simple as the last few lines suggest. On the one hand, ruralhouseholds' situations vary greatly from region to region, and there are cases where they may beprotected by modes of access to agricultural and forested land, especially the most vulnerablehouseholds. Recent events, and the global food crisis in particular, have reminded Vietnam thatthere is still a role for agriculture and rural producers, and once again put the question of ruralland under the spotlight. In response to this crisis (and soaring rice prices), the governmentdecided to freeze more than one million hectares of rice fields and launch a campaign reaffirmingthe value of rural areas in relation to urban areas (the 'three nong'). It is too early to know whetherthe return to 'rural values' in 2008 will have a lasting impact on agricultural land, and exactlywhat this impact will be. But the decisions that have been taken show that agricultural land stillconstitutes a lever that the government will not hesitate to use when the need arises. For certainnational officials, agricultural land remains a strong symbol of socialism, and its regulation acrucial element of social peace in what is still a largely rural society with close attachments to theland. Agricultural land is also an issue that raises questions about the State's role in the movetowards 'market socialism', and the legitimacy of the Communist Party. While the State'sindecision (or approximations) with regard to land matters could be interpreted as evidence of acertain pragmatism and determination to work with the legacy of the socialist period, recentdevelopments in this domain are testing the very foundations of the Communist Party'slegitimacy, and it could try to deflect this threat by getting the government to maintain the specificstatus of rural land. So is Vietnam heading towards a two-tier system where some land – the vastblock of agricultural and forest lands allocated free of charge – continues to be managed bycentral government in the nation's interest, while other agricultural land can be mobilised atleisure and managed under a liberal regime in order to support the country's economicdevelopment?In order to answer this question we needed to turn to the land actors and seek their opinions. Themajority of foreign actors (who were historically excluded from this sensitive strategic domainand whose involvement is therefore relatively recent) view the reform as incomplete and thus amajor cause of corruption. They are pushing to divest the law of these 'socialist archaisms' andmake it even more liberal. As recently as March 2008 the World Bank, which some see as theglobal symbol of liberalism, and which had until then deliberately avoided land matters, signed upto the highly ambitious Land Administration Project, making it the lead foreign actor in thisdomain and giving a strong indication of the direction in which land affairs are heading. However,the positions expressed by various national land actors are much less clear. On the one hand,officials in the land administration in particular take a fairly technical approach to land: their mainconcern is the effectiveness of the administration and legislation, and making land an autonomousdomain. Officials working directly with foreign experts tend to take a 'top-down' approach,looking at the development of the whole country and seeing the constraints associated with theprocesses of urbanisation, industrialisation and increasing openness. On the other hand, some ofthe actors we spoke to from the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) see landas something that cannot be detached from local and sectoral contexts. Therefore, they believethat agricultural land should respond to the needs of agriculture and rural populations, while forestland should primarily respond to environmental protection objectives. At the moment the firstgroup of actors is much more influential because of their strategic position within the landadministration and support from international cooperation; however, in the current economicclimate the question of agriculture and rural areas and populations has re-emerged as a priorityand is slowing the pace of liberalisation.So far there is no indication that agricultural land will be able to take account of the specificitiesand great diversity of rural areas, whether or not it is prioritised, planned or liberalised.Agricultural land tenure is controlled by the State, and characterised more by the numerousconstraints that it imposes (categories, temporal and spatial limits, etc.) than its capacity to adaptto the problems facing the country's rural populations, agricultural practices and environment.Liberalising agricultural land tenure would bring it closer to a system of individual ownership,which would make land legislation more onerous in many settings where local rights of access toresources are not managed in this way. The Land Law of 2003 introduced several innovations thatare helpful in this respect, mainly by creating a new category of users, 'residential communities',which allows groups to collectively hold use rights to unlimited amounts of agricultural and forestland that they are allocated free of charge for unlimited periods. However, this new measure isitself very restrictive in terms of what constitutes a 'community', the procedures it entails and theframework it imposes on collective management. So what place do customary land tenure systemshave in the emerging land system? Vietnamese land institutions seem to have made little or noattempt to plan for this; and the main reason why there are still such diverse local situationsappears to be the government's hesitant approach to agricultural land tenure. The co-existence ofactors with divergent positions on this question and on the role of the State, and the relativeabandonment of the rural world (especially remote rural areas) because it is not consideredimportant as long it doesn't challenge the objectives of urbanisation and industrialisation have lefta gap where customary systems can continue to function. The recent resurgence of interest in thisdomain could revive the debate about systems that are considered incompatible with theestablishment of a modern State, either because of agricultural practices such as slash-and-burn orthe functioning of longstanding local power systems, but customary systems will continue tosurvive as long as efforts to develop intensive, industrial-type agriculture are not sustainedeffectively across the country.
The introduction of computer technology into modern societies has enabled unprecedented possibilities of communication and data processing. While its applications are always intended for - and generally succeed in - improving the living standards, there can be inherent risks of new technologies that need extra attention and consciousness to be thwarted. In particular, one risk coming with the possibilities of vast data processing is data security. Unlike data in the pre-digital ages that could be tracked and controlled relatively easily due to the tangible nature of its carrying media like paper, data in the digital age appears much more elusive to the human senses. Furthermore, the pace at which data is transmitted and processed has surpassed what anybody could naturally perceive or comprehend. Even experts of computer science can only operate the hardware through several levels of abstraction. This leaves computer laypersons in the situation that they can just as little as the experts perceive what is going on inside the chips and networks, but they are furthermore lacking the expert's intuition and ability to conceptually descend from the higher to lower abstraction levels. They must therefore rely on the expert testimony particularly when it comes to the security of their data within the black box as which a computer system appears to them. If there is a lack of trust in the expert's testimony regarding data security, one could say that laypersons have lost their power of informational self-determination. This thesis is a step towards re-empowering citizens of modern societies with this sovereignty, by contributing to an increased trust in computer systems. Most of the author's research contributions have been in the specific field of physically unclonable functions (PUFs). However, the author has also been involved in scientific exchange with researchers from other disciplines to see his work in a broader context. A result of this exchange has been the so-called Digital Cloak of Invisibility (DCI). This thesis does therefore not only describe the author's work regarding PUFs but also describes the DCI concept in more detail than published before. A link between these two parts is that PUFs can be one of the components to implement the DCI. The DCI is the result of an ongoing inter-disciplinary cooperation of the author with not just computer scientists but also philosophers, economists and lawyers. It essentially constitutes a separation of powers for the collection, storage and analysis of personal data. The most vivid example for this would be privacy-preserving video surveillance, in which individual-related data is automatically erased from the recorded images. This erasure, however, is done in a cryptographic manner such that it could later be revoked using a specific key. This key is in possession of a party not suspicious of secretly collaborating with those in possession of the anonymised recordings. After elaborating on the DCI, this thesis continues to present the author's work on PUFs. With their property to increase trust in devices, PUFs can play a vital role in a DCI implementation. Because even if the hardware of a DCI device (e.g. a surveillance camera) is designed properly, it has to remain trusted for its entire life cycle. A PUF provides an alternative to storing secret keys in the memory of a circuit. Instead, the keys are derived from physical characteristics at runtime that are unique to each individual chip. Such PUF-generated keys are not just harder to extract from a circuit through hardware attacks, they are also sensitive to such tampering attempts. Because malicious changes to the hardware can impact the physical characteristics from which the keys are derived and thereby alter the key in the process of extracting it. In his work, the author focused on the implementation of delay-based PUFs on Intel field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Delay-based PUFs take the delays of signal lines as the chip-specific characteristics from which the keys are derived. FPGAs, due to their flexibility and relatively low costs, are both well suited for the implementation of delay based PUFs and a promising technology for DCI implementations. Among the author's main contributions has been the elaboration of how to implement and refine Ring-Oscillator (RO)-PUFs using the Intel FPGA architecture and design tools. Furthermore, he has shown the existence of location-specific biases in the FPGA fabric leading to a lowered uniqueness of the PUF-generated keys and has presented post-processing methods to compensate this. All of this has been done with the help of newly developed metrics and culminated in the creation of a new kind of RO-PUF using programmable delay lines (PDLs) to enable a far superior area efficiency. Such technologies are capable of implementing a DCI system and make it trustworthy. Future work will have to investigate the social and political requirements for its establishment in society. E.g. how can the hardware's trustworthiness be conveyed to laypersons in a traceable and transparent way? Who can act as the different parties in the separation of powers constituted by a DCI and what makes them trustworthy to the populace? At the end of such a research and development process, the implementation of DCIs could enable citizens of modern societies to reclaim sovereignty over their sensitive data, that is to take the power back! ; Der Einzug von Computertechnik in moderne Gesellschaften hat nie da gewesene Möglichkeiten in Kommunikation und Datenverarbeitung ermöglicht. Obwohl die Anwendungen immer zum Ziel haben - und dies auch meistens erreichen -, den Lebensstandard zu verbessern, können sie inhärente Risiken mit sich bringen, deren Abwehr besonderer Aufmerksamkeit und Achtsamkeit bedarf. Ein besonderes Risiko, das durch die Möglichkeiten massiver Datenverarbeitung entstanden ist, ist Datensicherheit. Im Gegensatz zu pre-digitalen Zeitaltern, wo die Weitergabe von Daten wegen der materiellen Natur ihrer Trägermedien wie Papier noch relativ leicht zu verfolgen und zu kontrollieren war, zeigen sich Daten im digitalen Zeitalter (Digital Age) den menschlichen Sinnen gegenüber als sehr viel schwerer zu fassen. Darüber hinaus übersteigt die Geschwindigkeit, mit der die Datenübertragung und -verarbeitung stattfindet, bei weitem alles, was man noch auf natürliche Weise wahrnehmen könnte. Auch Computerexperten können die Hardware nur beherrschen, indem etliche Abstraktionsebenen das tatsächliche Geschehen auf fassbare Begriffe herunter brechen. Für Computerlaien bedeutet das, dass sie ebenso wenig wie ein Experte das tatsächliche Geschehen in den Chips und Netzwerken wahrnehmen können, ihnen darüber hinaus aber auch die Intuition des Experten fehlt und dessen Fähigkeit, den Weg von den höheren Abstraktionsebenen zu den niedrigeren nachzuvollziehen. Sie müssen sich also auf die Aussagen der Experten verlassen, insbesondere dann wenn es um die Sicherheit ihrer Daten geht. Man könnte somit sagen, dass sie ein Stück weit die Souveränität über ihre informationelle Selbstbestimmung eingebüßt haben. Diese Dissertation ist ein Schritt in die Richtung, Bürgern moderner Gesellschaften einen Teil dieser Souveränität zurück zu geben, indem sie zu gesteigertem Vertrauen in Computersysteme beiträgt. Die meisten wissenschaftlichen Beiträge des Autors sind im speziellen Forschungsbereich der Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) angesiedelt. Dabei stand der Autor allerdings auch immer in wissenschaftlichem Austausch mit Forschern anderer Disziplinen, um seine Arbeit in einem größeren Kontext zu betrachten. Ein Ergebnis dieses Austauschs ist die sogenannte "Digitale Tarnkappe" (Digital Cloak of Invisibility, DCI). Diese Dissertation stellt daher nicht nur die Arbeiten des Autors zum Thema PUFs vor, sondern beschreibt auch das DCI-Konzept in einem bisher nicht veröffentlichten Detaillierungsgrad. Die Verknüpfung der beiden Teile ist, dass PUFs eine der Komponenten einer DCI-Implementierung sein können. Die DCI ist das Ergebnis einer andauernden Kooperation mit Philosophen, Wirtschaftswissenschaftlern und Juristen. Im wesentlichen konstituiert sie eine Gewaltenteilung für das Sammeln, Speichern und Analysieren von personenbezogenen Daten. Am besten lässt sich ihr Prinzip am Beispiel digitalisierter Videoüberwachung illustrieren, die um die Funktionalität erweitert wird, dass Personen automatisch aus den aufgezeichneten Bildern entfernt werden. Dieses Entfernen erfolgt allerdings unter Verwendung von Kryptographie, so dass sie später rückgängig gemacht werden kann, wenn ein bestimmter Schlüssel bekannt ist. Dieser Schlüssel befindet sich im Besitz einer Instanz, die nicht im Verdacht steht, heimlich mit den Besitzern der anonymisierten Aufzeichnungen zu kollaborieren. Nachdem die DCI ausführlich beschrieben wurde, fährt die Dissertation damit fort, die Forschungsergebnisse des Autors zu PUFs zu präsentieren. Durch ihre Eigenschaft, Vertrauen in Geräte zu erhöhen, können PUFs eine wesentliche Rolle bei einer DCI-Implementierung spielen. Denn selbst wenn die Hardware eines DCI-Geräts (z.B. einer Kamera) angemessen entworfen ist, muss sicher gestellt werden, dass ihm über seine gesamte Einsatzzeit vertraut werden kann. Eine PUF bietet eine Alternative zum Speichern von geheimen Schlüsseln im Speicher eines Geräts. Stattdessen werden die Schlüssel aus physikalischen Eigenschaften abgeleitet, die für jeden individuellen Chip einzigartig sind. Solche PUF-generierten Schlüssel sind nicht nur schwieriger durch Angriffe auf die Hardware zu extrahieren, sie sind auch empfindlich gegenüber solchen Manipulationsversuchen. Denn böswillige Änderungen an der Hardware können die physikalischen Eigenschaften beeinflussen, von denen der Schlüssel abgeleitet wird, und somit auch unbeabsichtigt den Schlüssel verfälschen, der extrahiert werden soll. In seiner Arbeit hat sich der Autor auf die Implementierung von delay-basierten PUFs auf Intel Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) konzentriert. Delay-basierte PUFs verwenden die Verzögerungszeiten einzelner Leitungen als chip-spezifische Charakteristika, aus denen die Schlüssel abgeleitet werden. FPGAs sind wegen ihrer Flexibilität und relativ niedriger Kosten gut geeignet, um sowohl delay-basierte PUFs auf ihnen zu implementieren als auch in DCI-Implementierungen zum Einsatz zu kommen. Zu den Beiträgen des Autors zählt das Ausarbeiten von Methoden, wie Ring-Oszillator (RO)-PUFs mit der Intel FPGA-Architektur und den zugehörigen Design-Tools implementiert und verfeinert werden können. Darüber hinaus hat er die Existenz von ortsspezifischen Delay-Biases in der FPGA-Chipsubstanz aufgezeigt, die zu verminderter Einzigartigkeit der PUF-generierten Schlüssel führen, und post-processing Methoden präsentiert, um diese zu kompensieren. Sämtliche Arbeiten wurde unter Verwendung von neu entwickelten Metriken durchgeführt und kulminierten schließlich in der Entwicklung einer neuen Art von RO-PUF, bei der programmable delay lines (PDLs) zum Einsatz kommen, um eine weit überlegene Flächeneffizienz zu erreichen. Solche Technologien ermöglichen es, ein DCI-System zu implementieren und dieses vertrauenswürdig zu machen. Zukünftige Arbeiten werden zu untersuchen haben, welche sozialen und politischen Voraussetzungen nötig sind, um DCI-Systeme in der Gesellschaft zu etablieren. Z.B. wie kann die Vertrauenswürdigkeit der Hardware auf nachvollziehbare und transparente Weise an Laien vermittelt werden? Wer agiert als die verschiedenen Instanzen in der durch die DCI konstituierten Gewaltenteilung, und was macht sie gegenüber der Öffentlichkeit vertrauenswürdig? Am Ende eines solchen Forschungs- und Entwicklungsprozesses könnte die Implementierung von DCIs es den Bürgern moderner Gesellschaften ermöglichen, einen Teil der Souveränität über ihre sensiblen Daten zurück zu erlangen. Daher rührt auch der Titel dieser Dissertation: Take the power back!
In: Integration: Vierteljahreszeitschrift des Instituts für Europäische Politik in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Arbeitskreis Europäische Integration, Band 26, Heft 4, S. 338-344
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The encouraging sign given by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry concerning Louisiana higher education isn't really who he just tabbed as chairman of the Board of Regents. It's how he replied to criticism by a former Regent in light of the reaction of other Regents to the appointment.
So far, Landry has had the chance to appoint only one member to the board that oversees in policy terms state higher education. That was Misti Cordell, who in real life works in health care administration but outside of that with husband has been active in Republican Party affairs and donors to GOP campaigns, including Landry's. All other members received their gigs from Democrat former Gov. John Bel Edwards.
After only a few months on the job, Landry appointed her chairwoman, falling back on Act 491 of 2024 that gave the governor the power to do so – if he so chose; otherwise, the boards affected can continue to pick their own – for bodies where he appoints at least the majority of members not otherwise specified in the Constitution. This perturbed then-Regent T. Jay Seale III so much that he resigned days later – and not gracefully.
Seale's resignation was accompanied by a screed saying that the move was "deeply offensive," presumably because it came with little warning ousting former chairman Gary Solomon; featuring "put[ting] someone in charge who was loyal to [Landry];" making service "a charade whenever the governor wants to order something to happen;" and likening the making of a relative newcomer the panel's chairman to a rookie legislator elevated to heading up the entire chamber. To which the appropriate response should be howls of laughter, given the absolute hypocrisy and stupidity of his remarks.
Rarely does a member of the Regents have anything more than a passing familiarity with higher education, and the expertise needed as chairwoman is no more than that for any other member. Further, the asininity of comparing someone unelected who runs occasional meetings with other unelected folks operating under a simple set of rules with no responsibility outside of an extremely narrow policy area largely confined by the decisions of other policy-makers to that of presiding over a legislative chamber is obvious to perhaps everybody except Seale.
And he should know, since has been very tight for very long with Edwards, at one time a state legislator who headed his party's caucus, and that whole backwoods political operation out of Tangipahoa Parish. So tight that in 2011 it was alleged Seale aided Edwards in illegally procuring information that caused a candidate against Edwards' brother Democrat Sheriff Daniel Edwards to drop out of the race in a suit that failed on lack of injunctive grounds. Seale also served as the sheriff's general counsel.
Seale only got the appointment because of that relationship, sealed by the $17,000 Seale and his firm steered towards Edwards for his gubernatorial campaigns, who then has the audacity to fault appointments on the basis of presumed loyalty. And who also with a straight face doesn't admit that governors always have controlled the Regents and the other four supervisory boards precisely because of their appointive power, some members of which were chosen because of their activism for a governor's campaign and others as a favor to a power broker who had aided that governor.
This reality was ratified by the acceptance of all the other Regents of Landry's move – even as Seale called it "illegal," in that Act 491 contained a special codicil that says for terms beginning after Jan. 8 this year had to have presiding appointments made by Aug. 1. But, technically, Cordell was taking over from a term expired Dec. 31, 2023 and the Regents are one of the few excepted boards who don't have to follow what the new law generally imposes on all others, that their terms be coterminous with the governor's.
All other Regents expressed satisfaction at Landry' choice, even Solomon. Of course they would: most want reappointment over the next four years which most will face, and only one (interestingly, the least likely on the surface Landry might retain owing to past conduct) donated to Landry during his gubernatorial campaign (one did to his attorney general campaign), if not to one of his opponents. Only Seale was enough of an Edwards political hack and loyalist to claim offense and depart early and voluntarily.
Which gave Landry a chance to respond, and in a way showing beneficial change to Louisiana higher education might be on the horizon. And it was full of buckshot: "Over the past seven years Mr. Seale has served on the Board of Regents, I challenge him to tell me how our higher education has gotten better since he has been on the board. Louisiana continues to have a higher education system under which little vocation can be found but plenty of student debt. ... I wish him well on his way out the door."
The attitude evinced by his response suggests Landry may be ready to tackle some of the larger systemic problems of higher education in Louisiana, such as its being overbuilt with too few students chasing particularly too many senior institutions. Or, speaking to an issue squarely within the ambit of the Regents, for years the Board has let Louisiana State University get away with flouting Regents' rules on admissions that exhibits deterioration of quality and standards. It did so because Edwards wanted that.
Now is Landry's chance to use his appointment leverage to start right-sizing higher education, both within systems and within institutions, encouraging the jettisoning of programs and functions that don't really contribute to a genuine education based upon useful knowledge acquisition and critical thinking skills. With his reaction to this incident, he has signaled he is ready to do so.
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Prospects for democratic gains in West Africa have taken two major hits so far in 2024. First, on January 28, the military-ruled Sahelian countries Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger announced their withdrawal from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), a regional economic and diplomatic bloc. Second, on February 3, Senegal's term-limited President Macky Sall unilaterally postponed the country's presidential elections, scheduled for February 25; a pliant legislature voted two days later to place the new election date on December 15.The U.S., which has looked to ECOWAS as the key front-line diplomatic actor in responding to West Africa's crises, has cause for concern as well as reasons for reflection — especially about how its aversion to seriously criticizing civilian incumbents has helped lead to this juncture.The crises in Senegal and within ECOWAS are interrelated in several ways. ECOWAS has been vocal but severely inconsistent in attempting to uphold democratic norms in the region. ECOWAS intervened militarily to oust longtime Gambian President Yahaya Jammeh after he conceded his country's 2016 elections but then tried to reverse that decision; the intervention represented the high-water mark of ECOWAS's enforcement power in recent years. Before and after, however, ECOWAS reacted tepidly to relatively blatant power grabs and executive overreach by West African leaders, setting the stage for coups and other forms of upheaval.Civilian presidents' overreach included several instances in which legal systems targeted prominent opposition figures at moments that were highly politically convenient for incumbents; for example, in Niger under President Mahamadou Issoufou and in Senegal under Sall. ECOWAS had little criticism to make of those maneuvers, or of dubious third term bids by leaders in Guinea and Cote d'Ivoire, or of a deeply flawed legislative election in Mali, all of which took place in 2020.Post-election discontent contributed directly to coups in Mali (2020) and Guinea (2021), suggesting that ECOWAS's (and Western powers') reluctance to criticize civilian incumbents can actually feed, rather than tamp down, political instability. ECOWAS's tolerance of civilian overreach also weakened its credibility when negotiating with coup-makers in Mali, Guinea, Burkina Faso, and Niger, and that same tolerance has also likely been one factor emboldening Sall in his recent decision to postpone Senegal's elections. ECOWAS has also lost face through its unsuccessful sanctions regime against Mali in 2022, which failed to bring that country's junta to heel, and through some members' threats to invade Niger after the 2023 coup (and subsequent and ongoing detention of president Mohamed Bazoum and his family) there. Those threats were both reckless to make and embarrassing to abandon.The Sahelian juntas' decision to leave ECOWAS has raised numerous questions about the bloc's future, as well as the future of other West African regional organizations, such as the West African Monetary Union (a group of Francophone countries with a common currency); so far, Mali, Niger, and Burkina Faso have not left the latter organization. Nonetheless, the three Sahelian states' departures takes a substantial swath of territory out of ECOWAS's zone, although the economic impact could be felt more in the Sahel than in the rest of West Africa, given that the former relies upon the latter (for ports and migrant workers' remittances, among other things) more than West Africa relies upon the Sahel. Pulling out of ECOWAS also lets the juntas delay transitions to civilian rule even longer, and saps ECOWAS's influence over its remaining member states.The disruptions to Senegal's electoral calendar, meanwhile, threaten to set that country back significantly. Senegal's democracy has been imperfect, to say the least: the country experienced de facto (and, for a time, de jure) single-party rule for its first 40 years, and, following the unprecedented opposition victory by Abdoulaye Wade in 2000, it took a massive popular mobilization to ensure that Wade ultimately conceded the 2012 election when his own time was up.Sall's tenure has been marked, as noted above, by a series of aggressive court cases against whoever the president's key rival happened to be at a given moment, with three prominent figures at various times banned from contesting elections. Nevertheless, Senegal's democracy is no sham, and the country enjoys several rare distinctions in the region, notably the lack of a successful military coup — and until 2024, no presidential election had been postponed there.Sall had already, with apparent reluctance, pledged not to seek a third term, and the 2024 election was expected to be (and perhaps still will be) a coronation of his hand-picked successor, Prime Minister Amadou Ba. Yet the postponement raises fears that Sall may have other maneuvers planned. It also establishes the precedent of putting the president above institutional rules.The United States government issued a fairly firm statement raising concerns about the postponement, the security forces' harsh treatment of opposition politicians, and the government's clampdown on internet access. The statement could have gone further by naming Sall, rather than referring amorphously to "the Government of Senegal." Presumably American officials are also working behind the scenes to pressure Sall to hold the election and not let the date slip any further than December 15. And hopefully officials are threatening actual consequences if that doesn't happen.This moment should also invite reflection, however, on how events reached this point. The full diplomatic record is not available to the public, of course, but if American officials did not earlier make pointed criticisms regarding the legal system's treatment of Sall's opponents, then they missed a key opportunity to prevent the scenario that is unfolding now. From what this outside observer can tell, American officials have typically contented themselves with a superficial stability in various West African countries, and have elevated some countries (Senegal and Niger, in recent years, and even more recently, Cote d'Ivoire) to "darling" status — with a correspondingly gentle approach to leaders there.As the Sahel dives into an even darker political period, with juntas arresting dissidents and independent voices right and left, and as Senegal teeters, American officials should be even quicker to offer constructive criticism to their remaining friends in the region — lest things deteriorate further.
ilustraciones, mapas ; La presente investigación tiene como objetivo general: explicar el modo de producción del tabaco en sus etapas agrícola, preindustrial, fabril y comercial en una sociedad integrada por campesinos, obreros y comerciantes. El proceso productivo que se expone, es desarrollado en una temporalidad acotada, entre diciembre de 1873 y octubre de 1875. Esto con el fin de analizar: cómo una actividad social, basada en un modo de producción anual de cosecha, beneficio, comercio y consumo de tabaco, trascendía desde las fincas campesinas de las zonas rurales al sur occidente de los Montes de María en el distrito de Ovejas, para trasformar un producto agrícola demandado en los cinco continentes alrededor del mundo. Para conocer este proceso productivo y el conjunto de circunstancias que lo hicieron posible, en el primer capítulo de la tesis, estudiamos el desarrollo de la cosecha anual de tabaco en el área rural de ovejas desde diciembre 1873 hasta diciembre 1874. En el segundo capítulo, explicamos la transformación preindustrial e industrial de la hoja en el distrito de Ovejas, entre julio de 1874 y febrero de 1875. En el tercer capítulo, analizamos el comercio del tabaco hacia los puertos de Magangué, El Banco, Tolú, Cartagena, Barranquilla y Bremen (Alemania), entre marzo y octubre de 1875. Finalmente, en el cuarto capítulo, investigamos cómo el sistema de intermediación comercial del tabaco conllevó a la acumulación y concentración de la riqueza en pocas manos, a través de las políticas del gobierno liberal radical y su inserción en el sistema comercial transnacional. Al conocer el proceso productivo y comercial del tabaco, sabremos sobre la importancia y trascendencia de pequeñas agregaciones rurales tabacaleras como Almagra, Flor del Monte y Canutal en Ovejas, compuestas por unidades familiares de producción que abastecían no solo el mercado local y provincial, sino a voraces casas comerciales locales y extranjeras. En consecuencia, el problema investigativo que abordamos se centra en demostrar: por una parte, cómo funcionó el modo de producción agrícola y artesanal del tabaco en el distrito de Ovejas, para explicar la manera como entró en contradicción con el sistema de intermediación comercial, este último, basado en una política de beneficio monopólico, rentístico e individualista, promovida por comerciantes de tabaco influyentes en el gobierno desde el partido liberal, en un contexto mundial de expansión del capitalismo y de sus sistemas comerciales provenientes de Europa y Estados Unidos. Por otra parte, planteamos explicar, cómo desde un pequeño distrito tabacalero en una provincia caribeña colombiana se elaboró un producto demandado y consumido en el mundo, para demostrar de qué forma las clases sociales trabajadoras de las localidades de un país periférico como Colombia a mediados del siglo XIX, tuvieron una incidencia en las relaciones de poder internas del Estado y en la definición de la sociedad moderna mundial. Por último, demostramos en la conclusión: cómo a través de la intermediación de los comerciantes de tabaco, se estableció un sistema comercial que monopolizaba y concentraba las ganancias, producto de la venta y consumo de cigarros, en manos privadas de los comerciantes locales y casas comerciales extranjeras. Mientras, en las áreas rurales del distrito de Ovejas y su casco urbano, fue organizado un modo de producción del tabaco, atravesado por las políticas del liberalismo radical en relación a la división social de la riqueza, el trabajo y la propiedad privada, dictadas por funcionarios del gobierno representantes de los intereses de los comerciantes locales. (Tomado de la fuente) ; The present investigation has as general objective: to explain the mode of tobacco production in its agricultural, pre-industrial, manufacturing and commercial stages in a society made up of peasants, workers and merchants. In order to know this production process and the set of circumstances that made it possible, in the first chapter, we study the development of the annual tobacco harvest; In the second chapter, we explain the pre-industrial and industrial transformation of the leaf: in the third chapter, we analyze the tobacco trade to the ports of Magangué, El Banco, Tolú, Cartagena, Barranquilla and Bremen, Germany. Finally, in the fourth chapter, we investigate how the tobacco commercial intermediation system led to the accumulation and concentration of wealth in a few hands, through the policies of the radical liberal government and its insertion into the transnational commercial system. Consequently, the investigative problem that we address focuses on demonstrating: on the one hand, how the agricultural and artisanal tobacco production mode worked in the district of Ovejas, to explain how it contradicted the commercial intermediation system, this Lastly, based on a policy of monopoly, rent-seeking and individualistic profit, promoted by influential tobacco merchants in the government from the liberal party, in a world context of expansion of capitalism and its commercial systems from Europe and the United States. On the other hand, we propose to explain how, from a small tobacco district in a Colombian Caribbean province, a product demanded and consumed in the world was elaborated, to demonstrate how the working social classes of the localities of a peripheral country like Colombia in the middle of the XIX century, had an impact on the internal power relations of the State and on the definition of modern world society. Finally, we demonstrate how, through the intermediation of tobacco merchants, a commercial system was established that monopolized and concentrated the profits, product of the sale and consumption of cigarettes, in the private hands of local merchants and foreign commercial houses. Meanwhile, in the rural areas of the district of Ovejas and its urban center, a mode of tobacco production was organized, crossed by the policies of radical liberalism in relation to the social division of wealth, work and private property, dictated by government officials representing the interests of local merchants. (Tomado de la fuente) ; Doctorado ; Doctor en Historia
The article clarifies the basis for the implementation of state policy by authorities to counter information threats in Ukraine. It has been revealed that in the context of global challenges, the main strategic national resource defining the economic and defense power of the state is the information and information technologies, from which the vital functions of society are crucial to all sectors: production and management, defense and energy, transport and communications. banking, finance, science, education and many others. It has been proved that for the own stable information development in the conditions of strict competition taking into account factors of information security, each state should ensure: understanding of information attacks and confrontation; creation of software for confrontation with information attacks; analysis of indicators of information threats in order to improve decision-making mechanisms in public administration systems; providing maximum protection against external influences; analysis of the state and technical audit of all means of communication; consolidation of the activities of state authorities and mass media in the field of political informing of society in order to neutralize negative psychological influence in conditions of crises and conflicts. The state's information policy should focus on reflecting the urgent issues that have emerged in the field of international relations and the field of information security, etc. The rights and interests of each subject of information relations should be legally protected. The most difficult will be the implementation of tasks within which it is planned to harmonize the information security of the country, the individual and the society and simultaneously highlight the urgent priorities, namely: to create / restore the basic security elements of the information security structure, to implement the above- mentioned scheme of the effective mechanism of information protection of the country, to review new ones information threats, eliminate existing ones, identifying the degree of probable results and the level of their intensive influence. The main information threat to national security is the influence that the other party can make on the state of the state information infrastructure, information resources, on the state of society, consciousness, and subconsciousness of the individual in order to impose the state the desired system with the corresponding values, views, interests and decisions on critical areas. in social and state activities, taking control of their behavior and development in the right other side of the vector. ; В статье выяснены основы реализации государственной политики органами власти по противодействию информационным угрозам в Украине. Установлено, что в условиях глобальных вызовов главным стратегическим национальным ресурсом, определяющим экономическую и оборонную мощь государства, есть информация и информационные технологии, от которых в решающей степени зависят все сферы жизнедеятельности общества: производство и управление, оборона и энергетика, транспорт и связь, банковское дело и финансы, наука, образование и многие другие. Доказано, что для собственного устойчивого информационного развития в условиях жесткой конкуренции с учетом факторов информационной безопасности каждое государство должно обеспечить: понимание информационных атак и противостояние им; создание программного обеспечения противостояния информационным атакам; анализ показателей информационных угроз в целях совершенствования механизмов принятия решений в системах государственного управления; обеспечения максимальной защиты от внешних воздействий; анализ и технический аудит всех средств коммуникации; консолидация деятельности органов государственной власти и СМИ в сфере политического информирования общества для нейтрализации негативного психологического воздействия в условиях кризисов и конфликтов. Информационная политика государства должна сосредоточиться на отражении актуальных вопросов, которые сформировались в области международных отношений и области информационной безопасности и др. Права и интересы каждого субъекта информационных отношений должны быть законодательно защищены. Самым важным будет реализация задач, в рамках которых планируется гармонично обеспечить информационную безопасность страны, индивида и социума и одновременно выделить определенные приоритеты, а именно: создать / обновить основные защитные элементы структуры информационной нацбезопасности, практически реализовать указанную ранее схему действенного механизма информационной защиты страны, посмотреть новые информационные угрозы, устранить имеющиеся угрозы, определив степени вероятных результатов и уровня их интенсивного воздействия. Главной информационной угрозой для национальной безопасности является влияние, которое может оказать другая сторона на состояние государственной информационной инфраструктуры, информационных ресурсов, на состояние общества, сознания, подсознания индивидуума ради навязывания государству желаемой системы с соответствующими ценностями, взглядами, интересами и решениями по сверхважным сферам в общественной и государственной деятельности, взятие под контроль их поведения и развития в нужном другой стороне векторе. ; У статті з'ясовано основи реалізації державної політики органами влади щодо протидії інформаційним загрозам в Україні. З'ясовано, що в умовах глобальних викликів головним стратегічним національним ресурсом, що визначає економічну і оборонну міць держави, є інформація та інформаційні технології, від яких вирішальною мірою залежать всі сфери життєдіяльності суспільства: виробництво та управління, оборона і енергетика, транспорт і зв'язок, банківська справа і фінанси, наука, освіта і багато інших. Доведено, що для власного сталого інформаційного розвитку в умовах жорсткої конкуренції з урахуванням чинників інформаційної безпеки кожна держава повинна забезпечити: розуміння інформаційних атак та протистояння ним; створення програмного забезпечення протистояння інформаційним атакам; аналіз показників інформаційних загроз з метою вдосконалення механізмів прийняття рішень в системах державного управління; забезпечення максимального захисту від зовнішніх впливів; аналіз стану і технічний аудит всіх засобів комунікації; консолідація діяльності органів державної влади та ЗМІ у сфері політичного інформування суспільства для нейтралізації негативного психологічного впливу в умовах криз та конфліктів. Інформаційна політика держави має зосередитися на віддзеркаленні нагальних питань, що сформувалися у галузі міжнародних відносин та галузі інформаційної безпеки та ін. Права та інтереси кожного суб'єкта інформаційних взаємин мають бути законодавчо захищені. Найважчим буде реалізація завдань, в межах яких планується гармонійно забезпечити інформаційну безпеку країни, індивіда і соціуму й одночасно виокремити нагальні пріоритети, а саме: створити/відновити основні захисні елементи структури інформаційної нацбезпеки, практично реалізувати зазначену раніше схему дієвого механізму інформаційного захисту країни, переглянути нові інформаційні загрози, усунути наявні, визначивши ступені імовірних результатів та рівня їхнього інтенсивного впливу. Головною інформаційною загрозою для національної безпеки є вплив, який може здійснити інша сторона на стан державної інформаційної інфраструктури, інформаційних ресурсів, на стан суспільства, свідомості, підсвідомості індивідуума задля нав'язування державі бажаної системи з відповідними цінностями, поглядами, інтересами і рішеннями щодо надважливих сфер у суспільній і державній діяльності, взяття під контроль їхньої поведінки і розвитку у потрібному іншій стороні векторі.
The article clarifies the basis for the implementation of state policy by authorities to counter information threats in Ukraine. It has been revealed that in the context of global challenges, the main strategic national resource defining the economic and defense power of the state is the information and information technologies, from which the vital functions of society are crucial to all sectors: production and management, defense and energy, transport and communications. banking, finance, science, education and many others. It has been proved that for the own stable information development in the conditions of strict competition taking into account factors of information security, each state should ensure: understanding of information attacks and confrontation; creation of software for confrontation with information attacks; analysis of indicators of information threats in order to improve decision-making mechanisms in public administration systems; providing maximum protection against external influences; analysis of the state and technical audit of all means of communication; consolidation of the activities of state authorities and mass media in the field of political informing of society in order to neutralize negative psychological influence in conditions of crises and conflicts. The state's information policy should focus on reflecting the urgent issues that have emerged in the field of international relations and the field of information security, etc. The rights and interests of each subject of information relations should be legally protected. The most difficult will be the implementation of tasks within which it is planned to harmonize the information security of the country, the individual and the society and simultaneously highlight the urgent priorities, namely: to create / restore the basic security elements of the information security structure, to implement the above- mentioned scheme of the effective mechanism of information protection of the country, to review new ones information threats, eliminate existing ones, identifying the degree of probable results and the level of their intensive influence. The main information threat to national security is the influence that the other party can make on the state of the state information infrastructure, information resources, on the state of society, consciousness, and subconsciousness of the individual in order to impose the state the desired system with the corresponding values, views, interests and decisions on critical areas. in social and state activities, taking control of their behavior and development in the right other side of the vector. ; В статье выяснены основы реализации государственной политики органами власти по противодействию информационным угрозам в Украине. Установлено, что в условиях глобальных вызовов главным стратегическим национальным ресурсом, определяющим экономическую и оборонную мощь государства, есть информация и информационные технологии, от которых в решающей степени зависят все сферы жизнедеятельности общества: производство и управление, оборона и энергетика, транспорт и связь, банковское дело и финансы, наука, образование и многие другие. Доказано, что для собственного устойчивого информационного развития в условиях жесткой конкуренции с учетом факторов информационной безопасности каждое государство должно обеспечить: понимание информационных атак и противостояние им; создание программного обеспечения противостояния информационным атакам; анализ показателей информационных угроз в целях совершенствования механизмов принятия решений в системах государственного управления; обеспечения максимальной защиты от внешних воздействий; анализ и технический аудит всех средств коммуникации; консолидация деятельности органов государственной власти и СМИ в сфере политического информирования общества для нейтрализации негативного психологического воздействия в условиях кризисов и конфликтов. Информационная политика государства должна сосредоточиться на отражении актуальных вопросов, которые сформировались в области международных отношений и области информационной безопасности и др. Права и интересы каждого субъекта информационных отношений должны быть законодательно защищены. Самым важным будет реализация задач, в рамках которых планируется гармонично обеспечить информационную безопасность страны, индивида и социума и одновременно выделить определенные приоритеты, а именно: создать / обновить основные защитные элементы структуры информационной нацбезопасности, практически реализовать указанную ранее схему действенного механизма информационной защиты страны, посмотреть новые информационные угрозы, устранить имеющиеся угрозы, определив степени вероятных результатов и уровня их интенсивного воздействия. Главной информационной угрозой для национальной безопасности является влияние, которое может оказать другая сторона на состояние государственной информационной инфраструктуры, информационных ресурсов, на состояние общества, сознания, подсознания индивидуума ради навязывания государству желаемой системы с соответствующими ценностями, взглядами, интересами и решениями по сверхважным сферам в общественной и государственной деятельности, взятие под контроль их поведения и развития в нужном другой стороне векторе. ; У статті з'ясовано основи реалізації державної політики органами влади щодо протидії інформаційним загрозам в Україні. З'ясовано, що в умовах глобальних викликів головним стратегічним національним ресурсом, що визначає економічну і оборонну міць держави, є інформація та інформаційні технології, від яких вирішальною мірою залежать всі сфери життєдіяльності суспільства: виробництво та управління, оборона і енергетика, транспорт і зв'язок, банківська справа і фінанси, наука, освіта і багато інших. Доведено, що для власного сталого інформаційного розвитку в умовах жорсткої конкуренції з урахуванням чинників інформаційної безпеки кожна держава повинна забезпечити: розуміння інформаційних атак та протистояння ним; створення програмного забезпечення протистояння інформаційним атакам; аналіз показників інформаційних загроз з метою вдосконалення механізмів прийняття рішень в системах державного управління; забезпечення максимального захисту від зовнішніх впливів; аналіз стану і технічний аудит всіх засобів комунікації; консолідація діяльності органів державної влади та ЗМІ у сфері політичного інформування суспільства для нейтралізації негативного психологічного впливу в умовах криз та конфліктів. Інформаційна політика держави має зосередитися на віддзеркаленні нагальних питань, що сформувалися у галузі міжнародних відносин та галузі інформаційної безпеки та ін. Права та інтереси кожного суб'єкта інформаційних взаємин мають бути законодавчо захищені. Найважчим буде реалізація завдань, в межах яких планується гармонійно забезпечити інформаційну безпеку країни, індивіда і соціуму й одночасно виокремити нагальні пріоритети, а саме: створити/відновити основні захисні елементи структури інформаційної нацбезпеки, практично реалізувати зазначену раніше схему дієвого механізму інформаційного захисту країни, переглянути нові інформаційні загрози, усунути наявні, визначивши ступені імовірних результатів та рівня їхнього інтенсивного впливу. Головною інформаційною загрозою для національної безпеки є вплив, який може здійснити інша сторона на стан державної інформаційної інфраструктури, інформаційних ресурсів, на стан суспільства, свідомості, підсвідомості індивідуума задля нав'язування державі бажаної системи з відповідними цінностями, поглядами, інтересами і рішеннями щодо надважливих сфер у суспільній і державній діяльності, взяття під контроль їхньої поведінки і розвитку у потрібному іншій стороні векторі.
Mobility as a Service is a quite novel term and has not a commonly agreed definition yet. In this report we use the term Combined mobility services to describe a service offering, including public transport in combination with other transport modes such as taxi, car-sharing, bike-sharing etc. The drivers for the change in how we will consume mobility are multiple, but the report discusses Societal trends such as Urbanisation ad climate change and sharing economy, Economical trends such as excess capacity and new payment systems together with technological development as enabler for the transition. New mobility services are constantly entering the market, and one of the most well-known is UBER. The limousine brokering service that, based on a technological platform have expanded around the world and also in terms of the service offering, now offering services covering the taxi-segment and now starting to offer services very close to public transport. The auto-makers are starting to grasp a possible different future, and are launching mobility services such as car-pool, free-floating car-pools and simplified car-owning schemes. Especially in the Nordic countries, the concept of MaaS is taking of, with services like Ubigo, which was piloted in Goteborg during 2014 and MaaS.fi, a Finnish MaaS-service to be started in 2016 in Finland with the goal of a global expansion. Telecom actors like Ericsson and Sonera are also active in this area. In Sweden, the public transport sector is analysing which role they should take in the MaaS-actor-ecosystem, and in Västra Götaland, a pre-commercial procurement of combined mobility services is scheduled for 2016. On a European level, the MaaS-alliance, supported by ERTICO[1], was formed during 2015 with the aim to stimulate the implementation of MaaS in Europe. EU also supports the concept by issuing a specific topic for MaaS in the 2016 H2020 mobility call. There are also a series of research-project ongoing, especially in Sweden and Finland, studying MaaS from a institutional, business and technical perspective. However, few studies are currently researching the sustainability effects of MaaS, even though initial studies indicates that MaaS, if designed bad, also can have negative environmental effects. Mobility as a Service can be designed in different ways and with different types of actors as the lead. If the public transport should be the coordinator of MaaS or a facilitating collaborator is discussed in the report. The report argues that public transport can provide a better stability of such a service (compared to a commercial MaaS operator), but also that public transport do not have the same flexibility in service offering as an external actor, and that they may attract more public transport users than car-owners to the service, in which case the environmental effects can be negative. The report also argues that if MaaS-service is subsidized (other than the services provided by PT), it can also lead to negative rebound effects, and if it is NOT subsidized, there are less reasons why public transport should organise the MaaS-service. UITP, the international organisation for public transport, have an active process for combined mobility services, CMS,(as MaaS is named in the PT sector) and promotes PT to take an active or even leading role in the establishment of this. In the report, some models are introduced for describing different types of mobility services emerging, and the most important distinction of what the report describes as MaaS, is that a Combined Mobility Service provides a subscription of some kind and possibly also a re-packaging of included services, while integrated public transport mainly gives the user the possibility to plan, book, and pay for the whole journey with several transport modes in one service (app). CMS is therefore both a business model and a technical platform which draws its profitability on the reduction of privately owned cars, whilst integrated public transport represents mainly a technical integration which mainly simplifies the shift between modes for a single trip. Both these versions are often referred as MaaS-services. The eco-system of MaaS, and different actor roles are introduced in the report, showing that there are business opportunities for Maas-operators, platform providers, mobility service providers as well as for public transport if the MaaS-service is designed in a right way. Several institutional barriers are identified in the report, which if addressed, could facilitate a faster introduction of MaaS. The Swedish transport subsidy system is discussed, where subsidizing of cars is allowed, but not the subsidizing of mobility services. The role of public transport and the importance of PT (brand) facing the customer, or if a neutral actor is better in attracting private car-owners to exchange the car for mobility services. The technical matureness of public transport is addressed, while a digitized business process (buying, paying and distributing electronic tickets) is a prerequisite for a commercial MaaS-operator to be able to include public transport in the service offering. Technically, Swedish public transport has a very good position through the work done at X2AB/Samtrafiken, but the policy issues around the possibility for third-party actors to use this, is not yet addressed, especially not on a national level. Finally several areas are identified where more research is needed to fully understand and take advantage of the possibilities with MaaS. The foremost area, where few initiatives have been identified, is the sustainability effects of MaaS. If wrongly designed, MaaS can give environmental effects of the service are negative (e.g making PT users to use more car-pools), and positive effects are gained if citizens are exchanging the owning of a car with subscription of mobility services. Other identified research areas are social factors like accessibility are effected by less car-ownership and the introduction of MaaS, how MaaS can contribute to resource efficiency, how MaaS can be supported by policy integration and other institutional issues. [1] European network for ITS deployment. www.ertico.com ; MaaS Framework
In: Lütken , S , Soezer , A , Forner , C , Bonduki , Y , Vener , J , Hinostroza , M L , Röser , F & van Tilburg , X 2016 , Guidance for NAMA Design in the Context of Nationally Determined Contributions .
Under the Paris Agreement, the Parties agreed, among other things, to hold the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2ºC above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit this increase to 1.5ºC. Article 3 further specifies that, as Nationally Determined Contributions to the global response to climate change, the Parties will undertake and communicate ambitious efforts under different areas. Under Article 4 of the Paris Agreement, the temperature goal is translated into an aim whereby global greenhouse gas emissions will peak and be followed by rapid reductions so as to achieve a balance between emissions and removals. The global trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions is to be achieved through the combined efforts of the Parties: under Article 4, paragraph 2, 'each Party shall prepare, communicate and maintain successive nationally determined contributions that it intends to achieve. Further, Parties shall also pursue domestic mitigation measures, with the aim of achieving the objectives of such contributions.' NAMAs, originally conceptualized as voluntary actions taken by developing countries to reduce GHG emissions to levels below those of 'business as usual' (BAU) scenarios, are well placed to help countries achieve these objectives. NAMAs, as well as NDCs, generally support and are aligned with sustainable development as interpreted by the host country, including any existing Low Emissions Development Strategy (LEDS). Since this is the case, and since NAMAs benefit from alignment not only with NDCs, but also, and particularly, with existing policies and priorities, they will often be driven by priorities other than emissions reductions, thus providing additional sustainable development benefits. NAMA's point of departure from existing development objectives and priorities might consist of re-evaluating these and placing additional emphasis on options for emissions reduction. A number of prioritization tools have been designed to strike a balance between a NAMA's alignment with current policies: its sustainable development benefits, including the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), its overall benefits to the economy, its financing and of course its emissions reduction. Some of this process of prioritization, particularly prioritizing among focus sectors, has shifted to the NDC level, while the sub-sectorial level, and particularly implementation modalities, tools and instruments, have become more focused at the NAMA level. A common requirement among donor agencies, through their support programs, is for NAMAs to constitute a transformational change in an economic sector or provide support for such change. In order for NAMAs to instill sufficient interest among such support programs, they are therefore also evaluated for their transformational qualities (hence, NAMAs can also be non-transformational, yet still achieve significant emissions reduction). Although transformational change does not have a definition, it is generally thought to reflect a permanent (irreversible) change from one situation to another and probably more rapidly than would otherwise have been the case. In such changes, finance and financial flows are central. Finance, and thus implicitly NAMA financing, is a central issue in the present context as well. Financing remains solidly at the implementation level (mitigation actions). To the extent that countries choose to pursue the NAMA route, this also applies to the NAMA sphere, as it is the measures that underpin a country's NDC that are financed in the end, not the NDC per se. A necessary starting point for any dialogue concerning NAMA financing is the provision of a transparent estimate of the total cost and possible incremental costs for the mitigation action incorporating already existing national budgetary allocations for the sector, the first step being to consider if and how such national budgetary allocations can be redirected in support of lower emissions alternatives. Hence, regardless whether the NAMA is likely to need international financial support, NAMA financing should begin by identifying the relevant domestic funds, public and/or private. Public funding may be used to build a foundation for investment from the private sector. In such cases, the creation of an enabling environment for corporate or other private financing must be a consideration from the outset, that is, in the initial conceptualization phase of the NAMA. While the NDC articulates the emissions reduction ambition of the country concerned and hence is a part of the framework for NAMA development, the specific NAMA development processes are non-linear and iterative. The production of information and documentation, however, is incremental. The implementation phase should be based on firm planning and dependable, appropriate organizational structures. This is also true for the measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) system. Quantifying the benefits of a NAMA, commonly compared to its baseline both in terms of GHG emissions and sustainable development benefits, is the gauge that all those involved – governmental bodies, international donors and financiers, non-government organizations (NGOs), civil society, scientists, and the private sector and supervisory bodies such as those within the UNFCCC itself – use to determine whether or not a NAMA is successful. The NDC may provide general baseline information, while the NAMA development process would (probably) go into further detail. MRV systems are then used to measure its concrete benefits. MRV is an essential tool for managing mitigation actions. It involves parameters for measuring the progress of the implementation of a NAMA, as well as for measuring or estimating its impacts in terms of emissions reduction and related sustainable development benefits, the latter of which are often the underlying motivation for the activity. The measurement methodology must be accurate, complete, transparent and conservative. It will also be very dependent on methods for retrieving, compiling and storing data and on principles used for estimating impacts. Even with an NDC as the framework, transforming a NAMA from idea into practice can take a significant amount of time and involves the establishment of an institutional dialogue to make it happen. Of vital importance throughout the phases of NAMA development is the engagement of all stakeholders within these institutions, capitalizing on the national priority of emissions reduction as signaled through the NDCs.