Applying the Environment Shaping Methodology: Conceptual and Practical Challenges

Abstract

Repatriation has long been the international community's preferred solution to refugee crises. This article argues that repatriation must be understood not in terms of physical return but as a process of political rapprochement between citizen, community and state. In particular, this work takes account of the need to accommodate community-based political identities. Repatriation should be conceived of as the deliberate remaking of a social compact between not only refugee-citizen and state but also refugee-nation and state. This offers a means for resolving the inherent contradiction between the notion of universal human rights and contemporary political organization which determines meaningful access to these rights on the basis of group or national identities. This is particularly important given the role of group-based conflict in causing mass refugee flight.     

Corruption: An Alternative Approach to Its Definition and Measurement

Discussion of the definition of corruption has progressed little since Heidenheimer's groundbreaking distinction between definitions centred on public opinion, public office and public interest. All these definitions have been severely criticised. I suggest that underneath these traditional concepts of corruption lurks a much older one based on distributive justice – namely the 'impartiality principle', whereby a state ought to treat equally those who deserve equally. This principle provides a much more plausible reason for why the public condemns corruption than alternative approaches, and, moreover, it is recognised fairly universally: the implicit distinction between 'public' and 'private' is certainly neither as 'modern' nor as 'Western' as many have claimed. The universality of the principle of impartiality does not imply universality of its content: who deserves equally, or, alternatively, on which grounds discrimination is ruled out, will be answered differently at different periods in time and will vary from society to society. The impartiality principle provides a starting point for the discussion of both corruption in 'traditional' societies and contemporary political corruption – corruption involving violations of specific non-discrimination norms governing the access to the political process and the allocation of rights and resources. The impartiality principle calls for rule-bound administration and thus underpins the public office definition of corruption. A central element of the analysis of corruption is the study of specific non-discrimination norms and their comparison across time and place. This approach leads to a significant enrichment of the concept of corruption.     

科学发展观视阈中关于社会可持续发展的探究

科学发展观中社会发展的有一个相当重要方面,就是社会的可持续发展。通过对科学发展观中可持续发展理解,从物质资源、人文资源、政治资源、社会资源、生态资源这五个方面可持续发展来论述了社会的可持续发展。在科学发展观背景下,研究社会可持续发展对于社会发展具有重要意义。     

An Alternative Approach to Estimating Who is Most Likely to Respond to Changes in Registration Laws

Scholars often seek to understand which individuals are most responsive to the change in some treatment. Such work inevitably faces issues of identification. When the dependent variable is binary, the assumption that the largest effect occurs where p = 0.5 is also encountered. I apply Manski’s [(1995). Identification problems in the social sciences. Cambridge: Harvard University Press] non-parametric Bounds approach, which relaxes the functional form and distributional assumptions found in traditional models, in an attempt to resolve the long standing debate on which types of individuals are most affected by changes in registration laws. Under the standard assumption that treats the selection of registration laws as exogenous, the results revise the current understanding. By exploring the power of various behavioral assumptions, new insights into the study of policy changes emerge, calling into question some of the assumptions that are standard in the literature.

重视社会主义制度可持续发展问题的研究

不仅生产力存在着可持续发展问题,生产关系和社会制度也存在着可持续发展问题。从逻辑的角度讲,资本主义制度不可能从根本上做到可持续发展,社会主义制度本身就是人类为了实现可持续发展的产物;从现实的角度讲,苏东剧变的教训,初级阶段社会主义的实际都迫使我们非常关注社会主义制度的可持续发展问题。呵以说,这个问题关系到社会主义的前途和命题。要实现社会主义制度的可持续发展,增强企业活力是必要条件,而要增强企业活动,就必须深化国有企业改革,以解决政企分开这个复杂的老大难问题。     

A Tale of Two Pulp Mills: Realising Ecologically Sustainable Development in Australia

Pulp mills can be fraught projects. This has certainly been the case in Tasmania with its two major attempts at building pulp mills generating much discord. The first project, Wesley Vale, was officially abandoned in 1989 after much conflict and conditionally controversy. The current project, Tamar Valley, has proved equally contentious and, although approved, remains problematic. Despite striking similarities between the two projects, the emergence of a new environmental policy regime in the intervening 20 years has engendered considerable differences as well. Yet the new regime's capacity to ensure smooth passage has shown itself to be limited. This article uses the opportunity presented by the two pulp mills to reflect on the merits of Australia's sustainability regime.     

Public administration in smart city: A bibliometric analysis

The role of the public administration is crucial for the development of smart cities. Several scholars have highlighted the need for greater contributions focused on the relationship between public administration and smart cities. This work aims to map the contributions on the topic highlighting the status of the field in the recent years. A bibliometric analysis was performed on a sample of articles published in business and management journals. The analysis was carried out using the R-studio Bibliometrics package. Results show that research on the topic is still in an initial stage and has several gaps that future studies could fill. The study is useful for scholars because it identifies the topics analyzed by previous research and highlights future research questions that could be investigated. The analysis highlighted the areas studied by scholars on the topic: urban planning, sustainable development, governance approach, Internet of Things and information and communication technologies.     

Improving Partnership Governance: Using a Network Approach to Evaluate Partnerships in Victoria

Partnerships of various kinds are now widespread, but evaluating them is complicated. This article examines the usefulness of a network approach for analysing partnership effectiveness, where the central concern is governance. The approach is based on interviews, and for this evaluation they were conducted with 120 people from 10 different partnerships in Victoria. A detailed examination of network structures uncovers important features of partnerships, yielding crucial information about them as governing entities, and providing feedback to partners on where effort needs to be spent on relationship building. This article adds to the existing knowledge about what makes partnerships effective, and to the toolkit available for evaluating them.     

From Big Data to Knowledge: An Ontological Approach to Big Data Analytics

The introduction of Big Data sets in the healthcare domain has presented opportunities to engage in analytics of very large sets containing both structured and unstructured data. With advances in information technology (IT), these data sets have become available from diverse sources at greatly increased rates. The availability of Big Data sets has introduced complexities that we must address, not only in terms of semantics and analytics but also in terms of data management, storage, and distribution. Currently, the capabilities to ingest, analyze, and manage multipetabyte data sets have underscored the limitations of our analytics capabilities supported by relational database management systems. This essay argues that an ontology‐based approach to data analytics provides a practical framework to address the semantic challenges presented by Big Data sets. No ontological framework can address the operational and management requirements introduced by the availability of Big Data sets, however. There are also a number of IT architectural factors that must be considered in implementing such a framework.     

An Empirical Approach to Post-conflict Legitimacy: Victims' Needs and the Everyday

Abstract

An empirical study has been made of victims of conflict in Timor-Leste and Nepal seeking a qualitative understanding of local post-conflict priorities. It allows an appreciation to emerge of how the conflict-affected conceive of legitimacy and quality of governance, with victims emphasizing basic needs, an addressing of issues of marginalization and the incorporation of indigenous understandings of the meaning of peace. The data in this study motivate a victim-centred discussion of both the limitations of liberal approaches to peace and the implications for the legitimacy of post-conflict governance of prioritizing the everyday needs of the conflict-affected, in contrast to universal and institutionally rooted liberal values.     

The Think Project: An Approach to Addressing Racism and Far-Right Extremism in Swansea,South Wales

The Think Project is a grassroots project initiated by the Ethnic Youth Support Team in Swansea, South Wales to provide a response for preventing far-right extremism. The project was designed to offer disengaged young people the opportunity to take part in a program of workshops, where the facts about race, religion, and migration are explored. This article discusses the results and the opportunities of the initial pilot project and will give a Welsh perspective on the implications for policy and practice in terms of community cohesion and fulfilling the UK government's PREVENT agendas.     

Where Science Comes to Life: University Bioscience, Commercial Spin-offs, and Regional Economic Development

Biotechnology, rather than being defined as a distinct industry like steelmaking or shipbuilding, is instead a scientific knowledge base—a rapidly evolving technology—that has economically valuable applications in such diverse industries as pharmaceuticals, medical diagnostics, agriculture, bioenvironmental remediation, and chemical processing. Biotechnology has captured the imagination of ambitious scientific investigators and investors seeking high rates of return, as well as state economic development officials who hope to anchor the industry in their locality and reap the industry's economic and employment rewards. Biotech is still at an early stage of its development, and there are many competing hypotheses about its future development. Most importantly, biotechnology involves the commercialization of science resources in which the federal and state governments have made substantial investment. One key question is how to leverage this investment for future economic growth. This article explores the policy issue related to the commercialization of biotechnology, its role as an engine of economic development, and the appropriate public policy response.     

Development and security in international aid to North Korea: commonalities and differences among the European Union,the United States and South Korea

In this paper, we contend that the nexus of security and development lies in the crux of challenges confronting human security and aid failure in North Korea. We first review academic and policy discourses concerning the security-development nexus. We then analyse how the nexus works out its logic in North Korea by exploring how insecurity and underdevelopment have fed into each other, producing a vicious cycle that complicates efforts to address human security in North Korea. In the third and main section, we examine the ways in which South Korea, the USA and the EU provided for assistance to North Korea from 1995 to 2012 at national and international policy levels. We analyse their approaches to international aid and identify differences and commonalities in them so as to better understand how aid giving exacerbates or mitigates the insecurity/underdevelopment and then impacts on the development-security nexus. We finally conclude with a consideration of various strategies to help overcome the dual challenges of underdevelopment and insecurity that besiege North Korea.     

Political Competition,Agenda Power,and Incentives to Innovate: An Empirical Examination of Vested‐Interest Theory

Technological innovations are by no means Pareto‐improving. I build on the argument that incumbent innovators can use political means to block rival innovations by emphasizing that the competitiveness of political system and some political institutions may diminish their ability to do so. I specify an institutional mechanism of agenda power, which provides newcomers with an improved ability to enter the game. The number of agenda power holders varies significantly among political systems, electoral systems, and administrative structures. With a sample of about 100 countries and across 20 years I show that politically competitive regimes, majoritarian electoral rules, and federal structures supply more holders of agenda power in comparison to their counterparts and, other things being equal, produce more innovations.     

Grassroots International NGOs: Using Comparative Interpretive Policy Analysis to Understand Meanings in Private Development Aid

Abstract

This research comparatively examines grassroots international NGOs (GINGOs), a growing subset of international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) working in private development aid. GINGOs are small-scale, on-going development initiatives through voluntary third sector organizations. How do GINGOs’ founders and volunteers understand their role in private development aid? The article uses an interpretive framework to examine three in-depth comparative case studies of GINGOs based in the US and working in South Sudan, Nepal and Haiti. Its contribution is that it provides rich data to build further theory about the experiences, or multiple realities, in private development aid. It is found that GINGOs’ founders and volunteers attach new meanings to private development aid to distinguish themselves from larger professionalized INGOs and emphasize personal connections.