Vol. 3 No. 2 (2025)

  • Open Access

    Article

    Article ID: 2200

    A decade retrospect of Chinese education in the Belt and Road Initiative: Achievements, experiences, and challenges

    by Jinpeng Niu

    Journal of Policy and Society, Vol.3, No.2, 2025;

    Education plays a key role in the Belt and Road Initiative in the new era. Over the past decade, education has promoted the implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative, constructing a multilateral cooperation mechanism led by the government and dominated by universities, facilitating the training of talents in participating countries, fostering cultural exchanges among countries along the Belt and Road, and developing diversified educational assistance models. Meanwhile, certain experiences have been accumulated, such as implementing province-ministry cooperation and leveraging local advantages, maintaining the opening of education to the outside world and building a higher education community, optimizing the governance system and promoting the internationalization of vocational education, as well as emphasizing the integration of strengths and exploring new models of international educational assistance. However, there are also numerous challenges, such as the need to overcome institutional obstacles of higher education systems among countries along the Belt and Road, the need to deepen educational cooperation and exchange between the participating countries, the need to enhance the level of China’s opening of education to the outside world, and the need to further optimize the “going global” strategy of China’s vocational education. Going forward, countries along the Belt and Road should seek to identify the convergence point of common interest and the greatest common divisor in educational cooperation and exchange, thereby contributing to the steady and long-term progress of the Belt and Road Initiative.

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  • Open Access

    Article

    Article ID: 2284

    Energy research in a pluralistic system: Bibliometric analysis of SA publications

    by Anastassios Pouris

    Journal of Policy and Society, Vol.3, No.2, 2025;

    This article presents the results of a bibliometric analysis of South African energy publications during the period 2011 to 2021. Bibliometric analyses have the potential to reveal policy issues that cannot be identified easily through other approaches (e.g., peer review). Several findings are important for policy. It is identified that a substantial number of the energy publications produced by South Africans are proceedings papers. Identification of the main funders leads to the assumption that the National Research Foundation funding for conferences has led to the overproduction of proceedings. The most prolific producers of energy research produce approximately the same number of publications. Energy research is distributed to a large number of universities in the country. It is suggested that this may create diseconomies of scale. Comparisons of the organizational outputs of the South African organizations with international entities identify that the country’s organizations are subcritical. Analysis of the international collaborative patterns of energy identifies that collaboration is very light in comparison to collaborative patterns of all disciplines. It is noted that researchers moved towards renewable technologies even though there is no relevant support from the government. The investigation identifies that bibliometrics is a powerful approach for monitoring and evaluating disciplines within systems of innovation.

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