Previous Events

The Institute for Development Studies, University of Nairobi (IDS) is the prime partner in a two-year research project that examines how decentralization impacts relations between citizens and the state and elites' incentives to provide public goods. The project is collaborative multi-regional research carried out by scholars from Sub-Saharan Africa (Kenya and Zimbabwe) and North Africa (Morocco and Tunisia).

This study showcases the configurational and causal pathways for understanding variations in outcomes of security-leadership decisionmaking involving the use of big data and digital technologies in disaster events. The seminar discusses a multi-methodological study involving multiple cases across the globe with a special focus on the 2014 Lagos Ebola and 2012/2016 Lagos Flood disaster events. The study argues that this multimethod approach helps to create explanatory models for understanding the factors responsible for differential outcomes during disaster events.

Tracing its roots back to scholar-led online initiatives in the 1990s, Open Access has since become both a political movement to democratise scholarly knowledge and a highly profitable business model that threatens Open Access by imposing new costs on scholarly publishing. Insufficient attention has been paid to the structure and hidden costs of various models of Open Access, and their implications for scholars from low resource disciplines and research environments.