Norway and Emissions Trading: From Global Front-Runner to EU Follower

A striking convergence has taken place in the design of the Norwegian and EU greenhouse gas emissions trading systems from 1998 to 2004. This article argues that the Norwegian adaptation to the EU did not take place as a consequence of perceived legal obligations under the European Economic Area agreement. Nor did it take place due to Norwegian actors being persuaded about the merits of the EU design. The main explanation has to do with interests. The EU market and politics are of course generally very important for Norway. However, before the US pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, the Norwegian outlook in climate politics was global. The US pull-out accelerated the development and hence the attractiveness of the EU trading system and resulted in EU emissions trading as the most probable and possibly only international market for Norway to link up to. Hence, this analysis provides further support to the importance of being sensitive to the global context and institutional interaction when analyzing the relationship between the EU and its neighboring countries.     

Norway between NATO,the EU,and the US: A Case Study of Post-Cold War Security and Defence Discourse

This article addresses the post-Cold War security and defence discourse in Norway, focusing on the impact of the transformation of NATO, an increasingly ambitious EU within security matters and the transatlantic tensions in the War on Terror. The article argues that changes or continuity in policy result from the discursive battle between various power constellations, which are forcing conflicting understandings of reality on each other. In this battle, the dominant representation frames NATO's transformation as a precondition for national defence with reference to alliance solidarity, loyalty and interoperability. The alternative representation, on the other hand, has framed NATO's transformation as negative for national defence, claiming that forces trained for global, warlike missions are neither capable nor available for national defence tasks such as containment of Russia's strategic interests in the Barents Sea. The EU has been brought into the security and defence discourse only when new integration steps, such as the European security and defence policy and EU Battle Groups, put the question of how far Norway may participate, to a test. However, developments like the slow withering away of NATO and unilateralist US foreign policy on Iraq are contributing to pushing the Norwegian discourse, and hence policy, closer to Europe.     

Handling of inspired vaporized ethanol in the airways and lungs (with comments on forensic aspects)

Collections of expired air and chemical determinations of ethanol concentrations in inspired and expired air showed that during prolonged inspiration of ethanol (vapour)-containing air about 55% was absorbed by adult human subjects. The fractional absorption was not detectably affected by variations in tidal volume (0.7-2.1 liters), nor was it significantly reduced in experiments where, due to preceding oral intake, the ethanol concentration of systemic blood was up to 50 times higher than that of inspired air. In these experiments the difference between the rates of change in blood alcohol concentration (beta 60) during and before ethanol inhalation agreed well with values calculated from measured respiratory absorptions. Mass spectrometric recordings of ethanol concentration in expired air vs. expired volume, taken in a state of steady uptake, also gave absorption fractions of about 0.55, and showed that the concentration in end-expiratory air did not fall below some 30% of that of the inspired air. These and other findings show that a large part of ethanol being inspired is deposited in the airway linings to be released again to ethanol-free alveolar air expired through the airways. It is concluded that inspired ethanol deserves consideration as a source of elevations of blood alcohol concentrations.     

Law is Myth

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique - Any title for this paper beginning with the words “law as...” would have been...     

Performance in Public Organizations: Clarifying the Conceptual Space

Performance in public organizations is a key concept that requires clarification. Based on a conceptual review of research published in 10 public administration journals, this article proposes six distinctions to describe the systematic differences in performance criteria: From which stakeholder's perspective is performance being assessed? Are the criteria formal or informal? Are the criteria subjective? Which process focus and product focus do they have, if any? What is the unit of analysis? Based on these distinctions, the performance criteria of existing studies used in an empirical review of management and performance are classified. The results illustrate how a systematization of the conceptual space of performance in public organizations can help researchers select what to study and what to leave out with greater accuracy while also bringing greater clarity to public debates about performance.     

Governing Cocaine Supply and Organized Crime from Latin America and the Caribbean: The Changing Security Logics in European Union External Policy

The logics of the European Union’s policy and practices against narcotic drugs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have undergone a substantial shift the past decade: from development to security. Based on an empirical mapping of the EU’s drug-related projects in LAC, this article argues that an ‘integrated and balanced’ approach to drugs policy is being replaced by a bifurcation between the broader domains of development policy and security policy. Questions are raised as to how the EU’s projects on development and security might counteract one another, and how the Union’s programme aimed at dismantling transnational organized crime along the cocaine trafficking routes to Europe might have unintended consequences. While keeping in mind the shifting tectonics of the international drug prohibition consensus, the article goes on to analyze the increasingly salient security rationale in EU external drugs policy against the backdrop of the EU’s emerging role as a global security actor. In doing so, it touches upon the intrinsic tensions between human rights and (supra) national security.