This paper contributes to a long-standing debate in development practice: under what conditions can externally established participatory groups engage in the collective management of services beyond the life of a project? Using 10 years of panel data on water point functionality from Indonesia’s rural water program, the Program for Community-Based Water Supply and Sanitation, the paper explored the determinants of subnational variation in infrastructure sustainability. It then investigated positive and negative deviance cases to answer why some communities successfully engaged in system management despite being located in difficult conditions as per quantitative findings and vice versa. The findings show that differences in the implementation of community participation, driven by local social relations between frontline service providers, that is, village authorities and water user groups, explain sustainable management. This initial condition of state-society relations influences how the project is initiated, kicking off negative or positive reinforcing pathways, leading to community collective action or exit. The paper concludes that the relationships between frontline government representatives and community actors are important and are an underexamined aspect of the ability of external projects to generate successful community-led management of public goods.

The purpose of this article is to determine the equitability of airport and university allocations throughout Ethiopian regional states based on the number of airports and institutions per 1 million people. According to the sample, the majority of respondents believed that university allocation in Ethiopia is equitable. In contrast, the majority of respondents who were asked about airports stated that there is an uneven distribution of airports across Ethiopia’s regional states. Hence, both interviewees and focus group discussants stated that there is a lack of equitable distribution of universities and airports across Ethiopia’s regional states. This paper contributes a lesson on how to create a comprehensive set of determining factors for equitable infrastructure allocation. It also provides a methodological improvement for assessing infrastructure equity and other broader implications across Ethiopian regional states.

The propagation of plant material in the arracacha crop is commonly done vegetatively through asexual seed, this activity has allowed its multiplication and conservation over time. The plant material available is of low quality, affecting the development and potential yield of the crop and therefore the producer’s income. The objective of the research was to comparatively analyze two technologies for the production of arracacha seed: local technology and Agrosavia technology. The information for the local technology was obtained from surveys applied to farmers and the selection was made using the deterministic sampling technique, and for the Agrosavia technology through the recording of data and production costs in research lots at commercial scale. Descriptive statistics and calculation of economic return indicators were applied for the two situations. The results show that the use of quality seed allows obtaining higher seed production (251,559 unit ha^-1) and tuberous roots (25,875 kg ha^-1), being superior to local technology by 14% and 28% respectively; thus, the arracacha producer acquires greater economic efficiency by obtaining lower unit cost per kilo produced and better net income with a marginal rate of return of 316.45. The results achieved are useful for farmers, companies and entities that wish to produce quality seed and support the arracacha production system in Colombia.

This article presents a methodology to perform quality analysis on the cadastral map, based on the tools provided by open (public or free) license geographic information systems (GIS). The errors presented in the cadastral map have a direct impact on the information systems, which can lead to erroneous decisions and to an increase in the costs of maintenance and updating of spatial data. The methodology developed was used and tested by Costa Rica’s Cadastre and Registry Regularization Program; as a product of this program, a continuous cadastral map has been created for Costa Rica, on which cadastral and registry transactions will be processed within the National Registry of Costa Rica. The methodology allows detecting, locating and classifying errors in the cadastral map for easily correcting, so that this map correctly represents the reality of the properties that conform it.

Aiming at the problem of incompatibility of biomass models of forest organs, taking Chinese fir in Fujian Jiangle State-owned Forest Farm as the research object, based on selecting the optimal independent model of each organ, the biomass compatibility model of Chinese fir was established with a three-level joint control scheme. The results show that the compatibility equation system based on the whole plant biomass can effectively solve the problem of incompatibility in the whole plant biomass, each sub-biomass and between sub-biomass. Besides, except for the leaf biomass model, all other biomass models have good fitting effect, which is of great significance to the guidance of the analysis of local Chinese fir biomass.

The study of the performance of high-efficiency heat pump systems has been a hot issue of general interest in the field of heat pump air conditioning. For the designed and developed two-stage casing tandem heat exchanger of heat pump system, the 3D finite volume method and the realizable k-ε model are used to numerically analyze the influence law of inlet fluid temperature and flow velocity on the overall heat transfer coefficient as well as the Nussle number of inner and outer tubes. The results show that decreasing the inlet water temperature or increasing the inlet refrigerant temperature can improve the overall heat transfer performance; Nu_in increases with the increase of water and refrigerant flow rates, while Nu_out increases with the increase of water flow rate but decreases with the increase of refrigerant flow rate; Nu_in and Nu_out both increase with the decrease of water temperature or refrigerant temperature increases.