Abstracts
Governance and International Development: The
Key Quadrants of Commitment to Success
Senyo Adjibolosoo
Fermanian School of Business
Point Loma Nazarene University
San Diego, CA 92106
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
ABSTRACT 2006
People in developing countries (LDCs) are interested in improving governance, the physical environment, the quality of life, the standard of living, and social welfare. Their efforts as well as the exertions of the developed nations have not yielded any sustained positive improvements in their quality of life. As long as the key quadrants of the human commitment to success in the international development industry are not fully developed, all efforts aimed at achieving good governance and sustained international development will fail.
Introduction
Senyo Adjibolosoo
Fermanian School of Business\
Point Loma Nazarene University
San Diego, CA
E-mail:
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
ABSTRACT 2007
Almost every academic scholar and members of the international development community attribute the failure of Africa’s economic development planning and policy to poor social, economic, political, educational, and technological conditions. As a result of this wrong thinking, the prescribed solution set for Africa’s problems recommends that African leaders deal with these factors if they desire to attain and sustain economic growth and development. In this brief introduction to this special issue of the Review of Human Factor Studies, it is argued that this recommendation is dead wrong. As a result, its pursuit for many decades has led Africans on a wild goose chase as they sought for real solutions to their problems. It is revealed that the main factor that contributes to economic underdevelopment in African countries is the quality of the human factor.
Triumph of the Commons: Human Factor and the Building of Sustainable Communities
Francis Adu-Febiri
Department of Social Sciences
Camosun College
University of Victoria, Canada
ABSTRACT 2008
Human Factor Competency (HFC) is a catalyst that makes community development transforms the “tragedy of the commons” into the triumph of the commons. This is because contrary to the implied stance of the “tragedy of the commons” perspective, what makes the commons a recipe for societal disaster is not the commons itself, but rather human factor decay/deficiency (HFD). HFD makes individuals and groups abuse the commons or use the commons as their private property to the detriment of the community while HFC reconciles individual private interests with common community interests. HFC therefore transforms the “tragedy of the commons” associated with community resources into triumph of the commons. According to the tragedy of the commons theory, there is recurring devastation of the commons because scarcity of resources creates inevitable disjuncture between self-interest and the commons that could be resolved only through privatizing the commons itself or the management of the commons. It is the position of this paper that individual self-interests could be effectively reconciled with common interests in community through HFC. Both individual self-interests and the commons are necessary for human society as highlighted in Rousseau’s Social Contract theory and classical sociology. Therefore the communitarians are right in postulating that rather than the commons being a tragedy, it is privatization of the commons leading to their annihilation that spells a human tragedy. The communitarians are, however, oblivious to the fact that both the commons and privatization produce disaster under the conditions of HFD. This tragedy could be avoided by HFC-driven community development. HFC intervention would lay the negative conception and perception of the commons to rest