Fiscal decentralization and natural hazard risks

At least to some extent due to pressure from international donors, many countries have become more fiscally decentralized the underlying premise being that greater decentralization might improve the provision of local public goods and services. We test this proposition by determining whether relatively more decentralized countries fare better when natural disasters strike in terms of its effects on the population. Overall, we find evidence supporting our maintained hypothesis, though the effect appears much more robust in developing countries.     

Guardians of access: Local prosecutors and open meetings laws

Open meetings laws have long frustrated access advocates, who allege that prosecutors do little to ensure compliance. The states provide a variety of enforcement powers in their open meetings laws, but powerful anecdotal evidence exists supporting the contention that there is little enforcement.

Prosecutorial discretion plays an obvious, though largely unstudied, role in the enforcement picture. To gain an understanding of the role of statutory language, prosecutorial discretion and other factors on open meetings enforcement efforts, the researchers conducted a national study of the officials responsible for enforcing open meetings laws. The survey offers the first national data on local enforcement activity and the first look at how prosecutors across the country view open meetings laws, illustrating the many weaknesses in current enforcement schemes. The authors argue that the data support the re‐examination of the way access laws are enforced.     

Hunters not Gatherers: Intelligence in the Twenty-First Century

Because of its origins in a sort of anti-Elizabethan paranoia against centralised government, the United States is poorly set up institutionally to cope with the major danger to itself in the twenty-first century: the threat posed by Islamist terrorism. The Director of Central Intelligence is neither central nor fully directing. A large part of the intelligence community, especially in terms of budgets and supervision, is outside his direct control. There is a 'waters edge' separation between the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the CIA. Essentially the CIA collects foreign intelligence and counter-intelligence overseas. The FBI, primarily a crime-oriented organisation, has had only a secondary function of domestic counter-intelligence. It is a case-oriented agency focused on establishing past facts in order to bring suspects to justice. It is psychologically ill-adapted to conceptualising threats that lie upstream, that is, in the future. In this context, September 11 can be most properly described as a failure of imagination. Remedies being proposed range from creating an internal security service à la Britain's MI5 to establishing a semi-autonomous domestic counter-intelligence agency within the FBI. In the field of covert action, intelligence in the twenty-first century likely will be characterised by what could be termed an offensive hunt strategy. Put in another way, intelligence operatives in the twenty-first century will become hunters, not gatherers. They will not simply sit back and gather information that comes in, analyse it, and then decide what to do about it. Rather they will have to go and hunt out intelligence that will enable them to track down or kill terrorists. This will involve sending operatives into countries with which we are not at war, indeed in some cases countries with which we have correct relations. In many circumstances, however, terrorist leaders will be hunted down with the help of host country elements. The likelihood is that this new strategy will be implemented primarily in terms of Special Forces operations aided by CIA elements. Modalities will have to be worked out between the Department of Defense and the CIA as to how such offensive hunt operations are to be carried out and how congressional oversight will be exercised.     

A Retrospective Approach to Valuation of Natural Resources in Wildland Fire Litigation

Wildland fires in California have been growing larger, more intense, and harder to control, and monetary damages sought and recovered by the government have been greater than ever. Intangible environmental damages is the category with the widest range of potential liability for which no quantification technique currently exists for use in fire litigation. In this article, we present our retrospective analysis of eight cases for which monetary awards have been made for wildfire-related intangible environmental damages. We developed a scale for intangible damages ranging from $18/acre to $1,600/acre that is aligned with environmental attributes of the affected forest land.