Institutional Effects on Decision Making on Public Lands: An Interagency Examination of Wildfire Management

A significant increase in catastrophic wildfires in the interior West of the United States has left public land agencies scrambling to reduce dangerous fuel loads and manage forests according to an ecological understanding of fire and forest health. However, this has not translated into standardized on‐the‐ground fire and fuel management in public land agencies. Different on‐the‐ground management practices raise questions about the extent to which ecosystems management is being utilized and how well land agencies are adapting to their new responsibilities. This study employs an institutional analysis and development framework to examine how and why on‐the‐ground decisions and outcomes differ. Decisions and outcomes are discussed as a function of the multiple layers of institutions that guide and constrain the decision processes of line officers who are responsible for developing and executing fire and fuel management projects.     

Check Out My Moves

Building on earlier assessments of visual representation in air and missile defenses, and on investigations of the role of representation and perception in warfare more generally, this article offers a semiotic analysis of the signifying practices and processes that are a necessary part of America's Ballistic Missile Defense systems. The argument is made that missile defense – a range of projects aimed at protecting the United States by intercepting enemy missiles in flight – provides a recurrent site of contestation of the image. To illustrate this, examples of the use and testing of missile defense technology to date are analysed from a broadly social semiotic perspective, with specific emphasis on the concepts of signs, codes and modality. Taking this approach indicates that, in the supposedly routine process of representing “threats” in a visual format, even the most sophisticated missile defense systems in use today still encounter severe difficulties, with potentially deadly consequences. This potential for misperception is itself an inherent part of the process of coding and decoding spatial data, represented in a visual format involved herein, which raises significant questions about the vision of nuclear security promised by ballistic missile defense.     

The role of local government in the review of public administration in Northern Ireland: The challenges of enhancement,devolution and modernisation

A very limited system of local government has been one of the main characteristics of public administration in Northern Ireland for the past 35 years. Yet in the recently completed Review of Public Administration changes in local government occupied a very dominant position. This article gives an account of the reasons for this, analyses the processes which led to what may be viewed as an enhancement of local government but argues that the principles adopted by the UK Government to guide the reforms, of subsidiarity, strong local government, coterminosity and good relations have not been met. The lack of an analysis in the Review of the implications of devolution for local government reform and the distribution of functions is highlighted including the relevance of the distinction between administrative and political devolution. How the proposed reforms relate to the UK-wide local government modernisation agenda is also discussed.     

The future of the United States as a European power: The case of NATO enlargement

Abstract

European Union enlargement has left Russia on the margins of European political processes and led to widespread suspicion in the Moscow foreign policy establishment of European motives. This has resulted in, first, increasing resistance to the imposition of European norms and, second, a more assertive policy, particularly in the EU's and Russia's ‘overlapping neighbourhoods’. Although Moscow is likely to continue the strategy of engagement initiated under Putin, Brussels must radically rethink the nature and extent of Russia's ‘Europeanisation’. Russia's drive for modernisation will coexist with the strengthening of sovereignty and the power of the state, seen by the Putin administration as key to external and internal security. The EU will have to limit its ambition and work within this ‘window’—wider or narrower depending on state of play—of policy possibilities.     

Learning by doing in contests

We introduce learning by doing in a dynamic contest. Contestants compete in an early round and can use the experience gained to reduce effort cost in a subsequent contest. A contest designer can decide how much of the prize mass to distribute in the early contest and how much to leave for the later one in order to maximize total efforts. We show how this division affects effort at each stage, and present conditions that characterize the optimal split. There is a trade off here, since a large early prize increases first period efforts leading to a substantial reduction in second round effort cost; on the other hand, there is less of the prize mass to fight over in the second round, reducing effort at that stage. The results are indicative of the fact that the designer often prefers to leave most of the prize mass for the second contest to reap the gains from the learning by doing effect.