The European Union as a negotiator in the international climate change regime

While the leadership role of the European Union (EU) in the climate change regime has been largely acknowledged, less attention has been paid to identifying the reasons why the EU often fails in climate change negotiations. Such an undertaking is deemed imperative following the negative for the EU turn of events at the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit. There is sufficient literature to be found on the link between the Union’s unique and complex organizational structure and its inability to act cohesively and purposefully. This study seeks to add to this corpus by looking at the extent to which the EU has been able to learn from its mistakes and incorporate timely remedial action. Even though important, the EU’s failures as a global actor cannot be explained by only looking at its ineffective institutional architecture. A more systematic understanding of the reasons behind EU’s failures in climate talks is in fact needed. By using Underdal’s theory of ‘negotiation failure’, this study tries to explore the extent to which negotiation theory could help with better comprehending the obstacles that prevented the Union from getting more out of the climate negotiation process.     

Earth system governance: a research framework

The Earth System Science Partnership, which unites all major global change research programmes, declared in 2001 an urgent need to develop “strategies for Earth System management”. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable such strategies would be, remains unspecified. It is apparent that the institutions, organizations and mechanisms by which humans currently govern their relationship with the natural environment and global biochemical systems are not only insufficient—they are also poorly understood. This article presents the science programme of the Earth System Governance Project, a new 10-year global research effort endorsed by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). It outlines the concept of earth system governance as a challenge for the social sciences, and it elaborates on the interlinked analytical problems and research questions of earth system governance as an object of study. These analytical problems concern the overall architecture of earth system governance, agency beyond the state and of the state, the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes as well as their accountability and legitimacy, and modes of allocation and access in earth system governance. The article also outlines four crosscutting research themes that are crucial for the study of each analytical problem as well as for the integrated understanding of earth system governance: the role of power, knowledge, norms and scale.     

Social entrepreneurs as change agents: a case study on power and authority in the water sector

In view of urgent social and environmental problems, it is important to understand the political dynamics that may promote sustainable development and to identify the agents that make changes in this direction happen. We examine the role and authority of a new type of actor that has recently emerged on the global stage—the social entrepreneur, who tackles social and ecological problems with entrepreneurial means. We consider them as agents that perform functions and provide services that have been considered to be the sole authority of states. For instance, the provision of water services has long been considered an exclusive task of the state. The water sector therefore serves as a good example to explore how these agents come up with their own missions and political agendas. Via an illustrative sample of social entrepreneurs from around the world, we explore their relation to water governance in general and the hydraulic mission in particular. We propose that their innovative potential serves as their main source of authority. Their local embeddedness along with their educational efforts, participatory goals, and accreditation as “social entrepreneur” provide additional sources of authority.     

The Haddon matrix: applying an epidemiologic research tool as a framework for death investigation

The Haddon matrix is a research tool used by injury epidemiologists. Although this matrix has typically been used only in epidemiologic studies, it may serve as a framework to investigate the circumstances of traumatic deaths. This matrix consists of three rows representing time phases (before the injury incident, during the incident, and after the incident) and four columns representing the energy agent, characteristics of the deceased person, the environment, and the vehicle or vector resulting in the abnormal energy exchange, which are considered in the context of the three time phases. The authors present four cases illustrating how this epidemiologic tool can be useful during death investigations. Although the objectives for epidemiologic studies and medicolegal death investigations differ, this approach can be used to describe the circumstances surrounding an injury-related death.     

Daily life and family in an Ottoman urban context: Historiographical stakes and new research perspectives

The Ottoman history of the family and of everyday life is presently experiencing deep theoretical and methodological renewals. Following the discovery of new archival resources, and the application of new questionings to previously known resources, the field is the object of an intense research investment. The horizon of expectation has enlarged, as renewed interpretations on tradition, Islam and their influence on everyday life, family, communal, urban and gender relations are the object of intense speculations in the contemporary intellectual panorama. The object of this article, conceived as an introduction to a thematic issue of the journal guest-edited by the authors, is first to draw a panorama of the existing literature on everyday life in an Ottoman context, with an attention to the successive methodological approaches and theoretical elaborations of which the field has been the support of, and then to identify the main stakes for today's research. The authors also argue that, in the present international panorama of research on those themes, not only is the Ottoman Empire an interesting application field for innovative methods, but might also be at the heart of a deep renewal, with at stake the discussion of the heritage of culturalist visions of history and of paradigms such as center/periphery relations and modernization.     

Decreeing organizational change: judicial supervision of public institutions.

In the last fifteen years or so, courts have issued a small but significant number of decrees requiring that governmental bodies reorganize themselves so that their behavior will comport with certain legal standards. Such decrees, addressed to school systems, prison and mental hospital officials, welfare administrators, and public housing authorities, insert trial courts in the ongoing business of public administration. In this article, Professor Horowitz traces the origins, characteristics, and consequences of organizational change decrees. He finds their roots in an unusually fluid and indeterminate system of procedural forms and legal rules, a system hospitable to the impact of changing ideas about the performance of bureaucracy and the role of courts. He explores the problematic character of organizational change litigation, underscoring the ways in which organizational behaviour is fraught with a variety of informal relationships beyond the contemplation of the courts. In Professor Horowitz 's judgment, efforts to augment the capacity of courts to cope more effectively with organizational change litigation may redound to the disadvantage of the judicial process by emphasizing the new managerial role of the courts at the expense of their traditional moral function. He concludes by suggesting that capricious budgetary ramifications, unintended consequences, and the impact of unconventional enforcement practices on the courts themselves be included among the elements of a full evaluation of organizational change litigation.     

Blocking change: facing the drag of status quo fisheries institutions

Under what conditions can international environmental institutions survive changing power alignments? This article argues that relatively declining powers and private domestic actors play an important role in preserving the status quo because they are eager to retain advantages that existing institutions afford them. This effort to block change affects fisheries negotiations, in particular, by allowing powerful actors to avoid new rules once an institution is in place. I hypothesize, first, that relatively declining fishing powers attempt to retain past institutional successes, while emerging fishing powers seek to alter the status quo. Second, negotiating positions reflect not only a country’s position in the world, but also the access provided to domestic stakeholders who wish to gain, or fear losses, from new agreements. Therefore, I hypothesize that powerful beneficiaries in domestic politics push relatively declining powers to support the status quo when those private actors benefit from highly legalized past agreements and participate in foreign policy decisions. I test these hypotheses by exploring US and EU approaches to fisheries treaty negotiations through archival research and interviews with fisheries negotiators. The evidence supports hypotheses that status quo powers seek to protect earlier deals more intensely when they negotiate with rising fishing powers, and when private parties are most influential. As hypothesized, both governments are particularly protective of the most complex earlier agreements under these conditions.     

Spinouts from academic institutions: a literature review with suggestions for further research

This paper provides a comprehensive literature review of the phenomenon of spinouts from academic institutions. We systematically identified spinout papers in key management journals, categorised the literature and critically synthesised the findings. We present the findings of each literature stream in turn and also identify inconsistencies and directions for further research. We conclude that while the early literature has been mainly atheoretical and focused on describing the phenomenon, a core group of recent studies were theory-driven.

Crime and rehabilitation: Correctional education as an agent of change—A research note

Offenders' access to instructional grants for postsecondary education has come under attack in Congress and in state legislatures throughout the country. Policy makers demand empirical evidence that public support for correctional education will reduce recidivism. Using 10-year follow-up data and logistic regression techniques, we estimate the likelihood of recidivism among parolees from a close-security prison in Ohio who have varying levels of education. We conclude that participation in a postsecondary education program contributes to postrelease employment, which in turn explains a significant amount of variation in recidivism.     

The English protoindustrial family: old and new perspectives

English research on protoindustrial communities in general and the protoindustrial family in particular has fallen somewhat behind that in many continental countries. Constrained by inadequate sources and a historiographical literature that has constantly placed the small and simple nuclear unit at the heart of English residential arrangements, English historians have often seen the protoindustrial family as little different in form and function from those to be observed in rural areas or market towns. This article uses sources generated by the English poor law to offer different perspectives. Focusing on Lancashire, as the protoindustrial phase of its development began to truly break down in the early 19th century, the article suggests that the English protoindustrial family was volatile in form and size and that the nature of underlying protoindustrial demography and the communal welfare system provided a powerful impetus to a process that saw the constant redistribution of kin between related households. It concludes that in Lancashire the expectation among protoindustrial families must have been volatility and that complex families rather than simple nuclear families have long held the English imagination.     

A new approach to measuring time-lags in technology licensing: study of U.S. academic research institutions

This paper contributes to measurement of licensing performance of U.S. research institutions by suggesting an approach for identifying time-lags in the licensing process. Licensing is a multi-state process starting with a disclosure, and resulting in intermediate outcomes such as patents, licensing agreements, and licensing income. The time duration among these variables is critical in understanding which investment is responsible for which outcome. This study develops a statistic procedure estimating time-lag coefficients among licensing variables using an unstructured regression model (OLS). The procedure is applied to 46 U.S. academic research institutions using the licensing survey data from 1991 to 2007 by Association of University Technology Manager. The results present individual time-lag relationships between each pair of licensing variables.     

International regime complexes and corporate crime: a research agenda based on the Volkswagen diesel fraud case

Crime, Law and Social Change - Criminological literature has often pointed to the absence or weakness of existing international regulation as important explanatory factors of corporate crime in...     

Correction to: Transnational law as a framework for law clinics

Jindal Global Law Review - A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41020-021-00137-6     

Infant class sizes in the new admissions framework: a devolution of power

It was one of the major planks of the Blair government's legislative programme that it would set a limit on school class sizes for the youngest children. While the objective of reducing class sizes no doubt has much to recommend it from the point of view of raising educational standards, it is also inevitable that parental choice of school, already emasculated, will be limited even further. It is particularly likely to be borne out in practice wherever governing bodies and head teachers are insufficiently aware of the ramifications of all the other rules and regulations enacted alongside the ‘30 pupil’ limit. Nevertheless, it will be argued in this article that, if head teachers and governing bodies are prepared to persevere with the small print of the Act and the extraordinarily convoluted regulations and departmental Codes of Practice, circulars and guidance issued along with it, then there is a case for saying that the new infant class size limit can—when coupled with other changes in the law introduced by the School Standards and Framework Act (SSFA) 1998—sometimes be used as a tool both to increase the devolution of power down to individual schools and to improve parental choice