Iran has one of the oldest civilizations in the world, and many elements of today’s urban planning and design have their origins in the country. However, mass country-city migration from the 1960s onwards brought enormous challenges for the country’s main cities in the provision of adequate housing and associated services, resulting in a range of sub-standard housing solutions, particularly in Tehran, the capital city. At the same time, and notably in the past decade, Iran’s main cities have had significant involvement in the smart city movement. The Smart Tehran Program is currently underway, attempting to transition the capital towards a smart city by 2025. This study adopts a qualitative, inductive approach based on secondary sources and interview evidence to explore the current housing problems in Tehran and their relationship with the Smart Tehran Program. It explores how housing has evolved in Tehran and identifies key aspects of the current provision, and then assesses the main components of the Smart Tehran Program and their potential contribution to remedying the housing problems in the city. The article concludes that although housing related issues are at least being raised via the new smart city technology infrastructure, any meaningful change in housing provision is hampered by the over centralized and bureaucratic political system, an out of date planning process, lack of integration of planning and housing initiatives, and the limited scope for real citizen participation.

The rapid progress of information technology has made public online participation in policy formulation an inevitable product of modern government reshaping and reconstruction. However, compared with developed countries, citizens’ online participation in policy formulation in China started relatively late. Thus, in order to explore an effective and efficient method for Chinese citizens’ participation in policy formulation, this research made a brief review of the experiences from the typical developed country of United States of America at first, followed by some other developed countries such as Singapore, South Korea, and Japan in Asia with similar situations. Still, combined with the current situation of the China itself into consideration, this research further proposes targeted recommendations. It is expected that the findings in this research could provide some references for the Chinese government to form more effective and efficient theoretical frameworks targeted at the future development trends of the Chinese society and accordingly, to improve the construction of democracy in China.

Climate change has affected the coasts of the world due to numerous factors, including the change in the intensity and frequencies of the storms and the increase in the mean sea level, among others. Argentina has extensive coastal areas, and research and monitoring tasks are expensive and require a significant number of personnel to cover large geographical areas. Given this, citizen science has become a tool to increase scientific research's spatial and temporal extension. Therefore, the paper aims to analyze the methodology and development of the citizen science project in Villa Gesell and its lessons for applying them in future coastal environmental monitoring projects. The methodology was based on an experience of the project co-created between activists and researchers. This project included four phases for social and physical aspects: training for the citizens, theoretic and practical aspects of coastal dynamics, and how to measure its geomorphological and oceanographic variations; data collection: the activists who received the training performed the measurements to monitor the beach; data analysis by scientists; and dissemination of results; the report data were disseminated by citizens in their community. The analysis of case studies in citizen science projects generates a fundamental learning arena to apply in future projects. Among the positive aspects were the phases established for their development and the methodology used to collect beach monitoring data.

The Corona epidemic, as a global crisis, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) ISIS (war, as a regional crisis in Iraq, have significantly impacted the atmosphere of companies and the continuation of their activities. The present study examines the role of these crises in creating incentives for fraudulent reporting and reducing or improving audit quality. It also compares the results of these two relationships with each other. In other words, the current paper sought to answer these issues: What effect did the ISIS war and the COVID-19 pandemic have on the fraudulent reporting motives of companies, and how did it affect the quality of their audits? In the end, the answer to this question was addressed: What are the differences and similarities between the study results of the impact of COVID-19 and ISIS on fraudulent financial reporting and audit quality? For this purpose, the data of 33 companies from 2008 to 2021 (462 observations) were collected to examine six formulated hypotheses, and the hypotheses were tested using the method of structural equations and analysis of variance. Interviews with experts were also used to determine quality indicators of auditing and fraudulent financial reporting so that indigenous indicators were selected and finalized. The results showed no significant relationship between the epidemic of the COVID-19 crisis and the motives of fraudulent reporting and audit quality and between the crisis of the ISIS war and the motives of fraudulent reporting. However, the ISIS war crisis has negatively and significantly impacted audit quality. Finally, the results indicated no significant difference between the impact of the epidemic crisis of COVID-19 and ISIS on the motives of fraudulent reporting. Still, there is a significant difference in the impact of the epidemic crisis of COVID-19 and ISIS on the audit quality. The knowledge enhancement of the present study is the development of literature on the impact of the Corona and ISIS crises on corporate financial reporting and auditing. The current paper, by studying the consequences of COVID-19 and ISIS, showed that further investigations in this field, especially regarding the capital market environment and A company, can obtain essential results based on which practical suggestions can be made for possible future crises.

Leadership is one of the important factors that ensured organizational achievement. Servant leadership offers a unique point of view on leadership which developed around the idea of service to subordinates. The implementation of servant leadership can lead to various positive outcomes, including increased engagement, organizational citizenship behavior, and improved performance. However, engagement and organizational citizenship behavior can serve as mediators to enhance organizational performance even further. The present study aimed to explore a prediction model of servant leadership using mediating variables such as employee engagement and organizational citizenship behavior, with employee performance as the outcome. The sampling method used was purposive sampling. This study used a structural equation model analysis approach to determine the predicted model of servant leadership. The research showed that the role of mediating variables indicated that employee engagement and organizational citizenship behavior had a positive effect in mediating the relationship between servant leadership and employee performance. The study indicated that applying servant leadership, with employee engagement, and organizational citizenship behavior as mediating variables would have an impact on better results of employee performance.