This project will develop a complete statistical description of distributed online systems where interactions between users are driven by reputation. Such systems are epitomised by the emerging online marketplaces of the sharing economy, such as Airbnb or Uber, where "micro entrepreneurs" and customers build a reputation through an online peer-review process. Recent estimates project revenues from the top five sectors of the UK sharing economy to reach £9 billion within the next ten years. Such a fast growth will dramatically increase the interconnectedness between different online marketplaces and their users. This, in turn, will bring about the need to promote trust on large scales by merging the reputations developed by the same users on different platforms. Indeed, a few startup companies already offer embryonic services whose users receive a portable reputation score based on the aggregate of their public online activity. Similar practices will require digital personhood to become more and more transparent to others, with serious implications to online privacy. This project will address the interplay between reputation, trust, and privacy lying at the core of the sharing economy. In order to do so, it will start from the observation that the sharing economy is a large complex network of interactions. As such, it falls squarely within the realm of application of Statistical Physics and Complexity Science, where collective macroscopic behaviour emerges from local interactions between elementary components. By taking this perspective, this project will produce a network vision of the sharing economy by first analysing data from platforms where reputation-driven interactions are at play, and by studying how reputation and trust between users form in online environments with the methods of Experimental Psychology. Then, by building upon this empirical and behavioural knowledge, network models capable of reproducing and predicting the macroscopic behaviour of complex online marketplaces will be designed. The project's high-level objectives are: 1. To identify the main empirical and behavioural regularities of online marketplaces driven by reputation 2. To model trust and efficiency in sharing economies as collective network phenomena emerging from the interactions between users 3. To model the effects of reputation aggregation in realistic multi-platform sharing economies

Ageing societies and recent reforms to long-term care (LTC) in many European countries are likely to make informal care by kin and nonkin increasingly critical for fulfilling the care needs of older people. To date, it is unknown whether informal care falls disproportionately on disadvantaged populations, and the consequences for the wellbeing of care recipients and their carers are poorly understood. The proposed research examines if and how LTC reforms exacerbate existing social disparities in care and in caregiver and care recipient wellbeing. To this end, this project compares the socioeconomic status (SES) gradient in formal and informal care and its impact on wellbeing across Europe and Japan. This objective is studied a) in context (across nations and regions with different care systems and within countries over time) using an updated set of indicators of LTC policies; b) from the perspectives of both the care recipient and the informal caregiver; c) through a focus on quality of care; and d) by carrying out policy evaluation natural experiments. A better understanding of the consequences of different care policies for inequalities in care, and caregiver and care recipient wellbeing, will inform debate on the potential impact of future policy decisions. The project team combines expertise on LTC arrangements, informal care, and cross-national analyses from demographic, sociological, gerontological, epidemiological and health economic perspectives.

1) Produce and disseminate high-quality, evidence-based research that informs local, national, and international policies responses to contemporary challenges: Expanding on our work using innovative methodologies to produce impactful research on ongoing humanitarian and governance crises, including conflict, mass displacement, Ebola and COVID-19, and outputs that have often shaped states and international organisations' responses to co-produce peer reviewed research, policy briefs and blogs with partners from the Global South. The focus will be on ensuring research outputs reach relevant audiences and cement the utility of a public authority lens for designing appropriate policy responses to contemporary crises and governance challenges, including strategic priorities identified by the ESRC and UKRI. Here, CPAID will draw on its existing relationships with academic institutions, and development and humanitarian organisations, to amplify the reach and impact of its research. 2) CPAID will produce comparative work to explore the extent to which 'public authority' can help us understand difficult dynamics in the Global South and north: The aim will be to further explore the utility of a public authority lens, developed in African contexts, for exploring contemporary governance dynamics and policy responses in UK, Europe and elsewhere, as well as Africa. Ongoing and new comparative research will fill gaps in knowledge of how populations and authorities are responding to emerging challenges and crises. This is important in an era defined by global crises, populist and polarised politics, and the retreat of state and international governance institutions. 3) CPAID will use innovative approaches and outputs to ensure a public authority lens remains a feature of knowledge production, analyses and policy responses: During the transition phase CPAID will work to ensure that its lessons and public authority lens is taken up and applied by new generations of researchers and practitioners confronting and debating complex collective action problems and waning trust in mainstream governance institutions. This will be achieved through accredited courses that centre a public authority lens in their understanding of development and humanitarian problems and practice, and through knowledge products such as blogs, policy briefs, journal papers, edited volumes, and textbooks that demonstrate the utility of the concept for knowledge generation, analysis, and policymaking. Alongside this, CPAID will continue to work with, mentor and co-produce research with academics, development practitioners and organisations living and working in challenging contexts and to disseminate it through a range of innovative mediums - from cartoons to podcasts and videos. 4) CPAID will enhance existing partnerships and build new ones to ensure reciprocal knowledge exchange and capacity building: The centre will use its long-standing collaborations with local partners to hold a series of round tables, workshops and knowledge dissemination activities that enable reciprocal capacity building and knowledge exchange, both between those from the Global North and south, and among them. This will not only enable CPAID researchers to further understand and rethink research relationships and inequalities, but also ensure new partnership with academics and organisations in the Global South and north advance our core mission of supporting a broad spectrum of voices to challenge mainstream ways of working, analysing governance and collective action problems, and policymaking. This will include collaborations with development and humanitarian organisations working on the frontline of contemporary crises.

This series begins with a set of questions which UN peacekeepers, aid workers, governments, researchers and conflict analysts are increasingly troubled by: how do we know what we know about fragile and conflict-affected regions and how far do our understandings reflect - and take account of - the views and perspectives of communities living in these regions? Bringing together leading scholars and partners in the worlds of policy and practice - including Save the Children, the UK Government (DFID and FCO), OECD and Somalia NGO Consortium (Somalia NGOC), Nairobi - the series will provide a critical and innovative set of fora for analysing how conflict knowledge is generated and disseminated - and with what implications for research and policy in the UK and abroad. This exploration comes in the context of a growing focus by Western governments and organizations on working on, and in, fragile and conflict-affected regions. The UK Government - now legally committed to spending at least 0.7% of GNI on international development - has steadily re-focused its aid portfolio around fragile states since the later 2000s and these countries now absorb over one-third of the DFID budget. Similar trends are apparent among other Western aid donors and organizations as well as among NGOs and researchers whose funding is often tied to these bodies and their agendas. Along with the UN, the militaries of developing states are also increasingly involved in peacekeeping and statebuilding exercises in fragile regions and polities. Alongside these developments, however, have emerged a number of issues which actively limit Western actors' ability to gain direct access to - and understandings of - communities living in fragile contexts. The growing number of UN and aid workers now being targeted by criminal and terrorist groups in conflict zones has led most Western organizations to introduce risk management procedures which ultimately reduce direct interaction between the 'international' and the 'local'. This includes the creation of heavily-fortified aid 'compounds' to house aid workers and their families, the collection of data from afar (via drones or other technologies, for example) and the remote management of projects. Thus DFID's Somalia Office (a Project Partner for the series) is based in neighbouring Kenya. This culture of risk aversion has also steadily come to curtail the ability of Western researchers and NGOs to live and work in regions viewed as too remote or dangerous by insurance providers, ethics committees or managers. Thus these communities also increasingly rely on ever-distant chains of 'local' interlocutors and mediators to gather data or implement projects - in a Western political context where ensuring clear and measurable developmental results for all aid disbursed is paramount. This series of research seminars will pose and engage with several key questions and concerns which emerge from these various paradoxes. Most prominently - what tools and methodologies can be used to collect conflict data remotely and to what extent can they replace or substitute more direct forms of information-gathering? To what extent can - or should - different social and cultural understandings be reflected in the collection and interpretation of 'local knowledge'? What role do local actors play in mediating or resisting the generation of knowledge on - and in - their communities? How is conflict 'data' transposed into conflict 'knowledge' and how far does Western policy and research on conflict regions take account of local perspectives? The series engages with a prominent set of debates in contemporary policy-making circles and global scholarship across a range of disciplines, notably Politics, International Relations, Development Studies, Economics and Anthropology. The participation of early-career researchers and scholars from the developing world is a key focus of the series and enhances its strength and credibility.

The SINCERE project (SINo-european Circular Economy and Resource Efficiency) is addressing the following priority themes under the Green Economy area: - The greenness and dynamics of economies; - Metrics and indicators for a green economy; - Policies planning, and institutions (including business) for a green economy - Green economy in cities and metropolitan areas. A focus on resources, sustainable consumption and production is at the heart of the principles of the Green Economy, according to the UN. China and Europe have highlighted the importance of resource-efficiency and moving towards a 'circular economy'. Europe has adopted Resource Efficiency as a flagship initiative, and China passed a Circular Economy Law in 2009. In light of these policy developments, there is a need to better understand the importance of resource efficiency on economic performance, the metrics and indicators through which action can be motivated and monitored, the underlying drivers of change and prospects for the future, as well as the role of institutions and policies. SINCERE has been developed to address these issues by bringing together leading researchers from five countries: UCL ISR in the UK, the Institute for Applied Ecology in China, Wuppertal University and FHI-ISI in Germany, ParisMinesTech in France and UM-MERIT in the Netherlands. A number of sometimes conflicting concepts can be found in debate describing desirable futures, e.g. the Green Economy, Sustainable Growth, etc. As the difference and the overlap across them is not always clear it is important to implement theoretical comparisons of these concepts and case studies exploring how they have been applied in Europe and China. Particular importance will be given to the Circular Economy and Resource Efficiency (CE/RE) and how they relate to the Green Economy. In addition to help deliver clarity in the theoretical debate, SINCERE will deliver new indicators for measuring CE/RE. As Indicators are critical for achieving policy goals, we will tackle them from three different angles through Emergy, innovation and SGAP-based indicators. Policy and Institutional settings are clearly very influential on how our society moves towards a Green Economy. The journey of innovations from laboratories to the marketplace is very influenced by policies and institutions supposed to tackle the obstacles normally faced by new technologies. SINCERE will examine the importance of innovation in enabling resource efficiency, both in China and Europe, and will study what enables and prevents the development of new, resource-efficient technologies. In the last part of the project SINCERE will examining historical patterns between CE/RE and macro-economic performance with particular focus on the relationship between CE/RE, economic competiveness, trade, and industrial structure. After having assessed past trends SINCERE will model how the future might look like by producing scenarios to analyse the implications of CE/RE on the economy, and the impact of policies. This will include multi-scale modelling, from the urban to the global scale. Models play a key role in economic and environmental policy, but often the issue of resources has been sidelined in economic modelling, leaving policymakers without clear guidance on the importance of the issues. Our modelling work will advance the state-of-the-art for analysis of the macro-economics of resources. SINCERE is a collaborative project building on the comparative advantage of the partners and their knowledge of the national context to develop a truly multi-disciplinary project where disciplines such as neoclassical economic, system dynamics, econometrics, ecology and innovation studies find a space to make an overall compelling picture. Our workplan is integrated to ensure that this project has a legacy so that the ties developed between European and Chinese partners are here to stay and produce future projects.