Effective small and medium enterprise (SME) leadership demands creative solutions to ensure organisations survive and thrive during the turbulent times that COVID-19 continues to bring. This paper explores how SME leaders (in micro and small organisations) prioritise and access the skills and development needed to provide effective and sustainable leadership to organisations, focusing on the role of resilience and the benefits it provides. Participants were selected through purposive and snowballing sampling. Online surveys and semi-structured interviews were conducted and provided qualitative data that contributes to an understanding of the role of resilience and the view of participants as to what is needed to effectively respond to a dynamic environment. Evidence shows that SME leaders prioritise learning and development opportunities that provide demonstrable benefits throughout the organisation. Building business resilience remains a fuzzy concept; however, viewing resilience as a multi-level construct offers benefits when designing and delivering development opportunities. It has been found that networking, partnerships, and relationship building promote resilience and may offer a solution to how to embed resilience building into development opportunities that SME leaders value and wish to engage with. This article contributes by illustrating and exploring leadership development within SMEs during a period of unexpected and untested uncertainty. The pandemic caused major shock waves within business communities, and SMEs were significantly affected. The research is limited in that it is expected to be a once-in-a lifetime event, and as such conditions may not be replicable, learning opportunities for other ‘shock’ events are possible. The findings of this paper have relevance to practice in that, while the event may be one-off, shocks to the business environment are not.

[Objective]In order to explore the sustainable food security level in the Yangtze River Economic Belt, ensure food security and sustainable development of agricultural modernization, it is necessary to establish a scientific food security evaluation system to safeguard local food security.[Methods]This paper takes the food system of the Yangtze River Economic Belt in China as the research object, based on the food security research results at home and abroad, based on sustainable development thinking, combined with a new perspective of dynamic equilibrium research: Beginning with food normalcy, a comprehensive analysis of food production, food economy, social development, ecological security, and technical support for sustainable development is presented using the entropy-weighted TOPSIS model to build a food security evaluation system for sustainable development. [Conclusion]After systematic analysis, it is concluded that (1) the average value of food security score of the Yangtze River Economic Belt from 2008 to 2021 is 0.429, and the overall food in the Yangtze River Economic Belt is in general security level (0.400 ≤ Q1 ≤ 0.600), and the overall situation of food security is not optimistic, (2) from the segmentation of the Yangtze River Economic Belt, the high and low level of food security are divided into sections: midstream > downstream > upstream, and each province and city is slowly rising to different degrees. In this way, we propose general countermeasures to ensure local food security from the perspective of sustainable development.

eGovernment projects are capital intensive and have high probability of failure because of the dynamic and technological laden environment in which they operate. The number of skilled labour and technicalities required are often not available in quantity needed to sustain such project. There is always the need to have in place adequate risk assessment framework to guide the execution and monitoring of eGovernment projects. Several studies have been conducted on the critical success factors relating to risk assessment of eGovernment projects to understand the reasons for the high rate of failure. Therefore, there is need to review these articles and categorize them into different research domain in project risk assessment so as to reveal domain with more or less research and those that need to understand the future research directions in risk assessment for eGovernment projects. Using the positivism paradigm, this study utilized the Systematic Literature Review methodology to collect 147 articles from the following academic databases namely IEEE, Preprints, WorldCat Discovery, ArXiv. Ohio-state University databases, Science Direct, Scopus, ACM, NWU digital library, Usenix, Jise database, Sagepub, MDPI Academia published between 2013 to 2023. Different inclusion and exclusion criteria were applied pruning to 48 articles that were used for the study. The results show the classification of articles in risk assessment for eGovernment projects into those that discusses project analysis, review, framework, maturity and model tools, implementation, and integration, applied methodology and evaluation with the percentage of articles published in each domain with the past 10 years. The various critical success factors that should be considered in the development of a robust risk assessment framework were discussed and future research directions in eGovernment risk assessment were given based on the reviews.

The reference urban plan is an urban planning tool often used to orient the development of Chadian cities. However, expanding Chadian urban centers, such as Sarh, face challenges in implementing urban planning orientations of their urban plans within the set deadlines. The objective of this study is to identify the factors impeding the effective implementation of the reference urban plan for Sarh town. The methodology employed encompasses a literature review, individual interviews with urban planning experts, geographic information system (GIS) data, household surveys and statistical analysis. The results revealed that less than a quarter (19.72%) of the households surveyed were aware of the reference urban plan. The applied logistic regression model identified age, occupation and level of education as the main factors influencing public participation in the preparation of the reference urban plan. On average, 33.33% of the urban planning guidelines and 21.74% of the projected urban projects were implemented, with a difference of 1631.28 hectares (ha) between the projected plan and the actual plan for the town. Five factors were identified as contributing to the failure to implement the reference urban plan for Sarh town, including low funding, inadequate land management, a lack of political will, weak governance and poor communication. Consequently, participatory and inclusive planning approaches, effective financial mobilisation, strong governance, and the use of modern technologies such as GIS tools are recommended to enhance the implementation of urban planning tools.

Science and technology play an extremely important part in today’s world. They are the key for countries to reach a certain level of economic and social development. Thus, in order to catch up with the common development of mankind, countries have issued their own policies and laws on science and technology activities. National science and technology policies aim to enhance social welfare, foster sustainable development, and advance global scientific and technological progress. Vietnam is considered as one of the countries attaching great importance to science and technology. Therefore, even in the law with the highest legal value—the Constitution has solemnly recognized the position and role of science and technology as the leading national policy, playing a major role in the cause of the country’s socio-economic development. However, in the face of the requirements of sustainable development and the desire for the country’s prosperity and strength, policies and laws on science and technology in particular and policies and laws in general of Vietnam must be perfected and renewed continuously, especially in the context of globalization and sustainable development requirements, modern nation as it is today. Therefore, the article focuses on clarifying the situation of adjusting policies and laws on science and technology in Vietnam during the past, thereby proposing new complete solutions in the coming time. This is the basis for policy makers to refer to in the process of developing policies and laws on science and technology in Vietnam.

This study aims to take Chinese higher vocational colleges professional group leaders as the research subjects to analyze the components of their key competencies, develop the competency model of professional group leaders (PGL), and analyze the main factors influencing the model. It provides a powerful help for improving the scientific level of the construction and management of the teaching staff in higher vocational colleges and filling the gap in the research on the quality and ability of Chinese professional group leaders. A mixed research method is deployed in this study. Data are collected with the help of a self-administrated questionnaire and a semi-structured interview based on grounded theory. Data analysis involves structural equation modeling using AMOS, complemented by qualitative coding in NVivo. It concludes that the competency development model of professional group leaders comprises two main dimensions: explicit competencies and implicit competencies. Explicit competencies include cross-border adaptability (CBA), resource integration ability (RIA), innovation and development practice ability (IDPA), management leadership ability (MLA), and interdisciplinary scientific research ability (ISRA). Implicit competencies include personality attitude (PA), and intrinsic motivation (IM). The study fills a significant gap in the literature by providing a detailed model of competency for professional group leaders in the context of higher vocational education, offering a practical framework for improving the training and management of teaching staff and promoting the development of professional groups effective in vocational colleges.