Environmental Policy As Learning: A New View of an Old Landscape

Environmental policy in the United States has always been characterized by high levels of political conflict. At the same time, however, policy makers have shown a capacity to learn from their own and others' experience. This article examines U.S. environmental policy since 1970 as a learning process and, more specifically, as an effort to develop three kinds of capacities for policy learning. The first decade and a half may be seen in terms of technical learning, characterized by a high degree of technical and legal proficiency, but also narrow problem definitions, institutional fragmentation, and adversarial relations among actors. In the 1980s, growing recognition of deficiencies in technical learning led to a search for new goals, strategies, and policy instruments, in what may be termed conceptual learning . By the early 1990s, policy makers also recognized a need for a new set of capacities at social learning, reflecting trends in European environmental policy, international interest in the concept of sustainability, and dissatisfaction with the U.S. experience. Social learning stresses communication and interaction among actors. Most industrial nations, including the United States, are working to develop and integrate capacities for all three kinds of learning. Efforts to integrate capacities for conceptual and social learning in the United States have had mixed success, however, because the institutional and legal framework for environmental policy still is founded on technical learning.     

法律体系的新成员——案例指导制度

案例指导制度是我们国家司法制度新近确立的一个组成部分。作为新生事物,它与我们现存的法律体系、法律制度是否兼容,这是值得探讨的。在大陆法系国家,案例制度一开始也受到了排斥,但後来还是逐步引进并确立了案例制度。我认为,对于中国而言,正在讨论建立的案例指导制度,与立法、司法、执法,包括法律职业、法律教育也应该是兼容的,而不是排斥的。     

当前加勒比地区的发展

加勒比共同体多数成员都是中等收入的发展中国家,它们的国土面积狭小,但经济的对外开放程度相对较高.除了苏里南和海地之外,加勒比共同体成员国都曾经是英国的殖民地.     

Europe’s Migrant Woes

<正>The EU should seek solutions for the migration crisis at home and abroad Illegal immigration is nothing new to Europe.But since the beginning of this year,it has become a humanitarian issue on a scale never before encountered,as a soaring number of undocumented people from the Middle East and Africa seek asylum or a better life in Europe after crossing the Mediterranean.     

Times Not Forgotten

<正>The National Ballet of China wows audiences at the Lincoln Center Festival The National Ballet of China(NBC)brought two classic works to Koch Theater in New York City as part of this year’s Lincoln Center Festival—a 2008 adaptation of Peony Pavilion and the beloved 50-year-old The Red Detachment of Women.Both works evoke an iconic vision of China,the first a Ming Dynasty(1368-1644)world of hidden passion,in which each subtle word or movement has great subtext,the other a bold and revolutionary cry of     

Explaining national environmental performance: approaches,evidence, and implications

Since environmental problems rose to prominence in the last third of the twentieth century, they have been a major area of policy for national governments. A large body of research has explored the explanations for different levels of environmental policy performance among countries. This article begins with a discussion of approaches to measuring national performance before reviewing and assessing four categories of explanations in the literature, which may be summarized in four questions: (1) What are the relationships between economic growth and environmental protection? (2) Do democratic regimes have advantages over more authoritarian ones in adopting effective policies and reducing harm? (3) Do such institutional characteristics as pluralism or neo-corporatism and federalism affect a nation’s ability to deal with environmental problems? (4) Are there institutional or societal capacities or relationships within or among nations that may explain policy success? By adopting a broad perspective on the literature on national environmental performance, the article is able to explore and compare the principal findings of these categories of research and assess the relationships among them.     

Reigniting the fire: a contemporary research agenda for social,political and nonprofit marketing

The paper reports on the core challenges faced by the nonprofit, political and social marketing disciplinary areas and suggests a series of research agendas to develop theory and practice to meet these challenges.

• Social marketing's research agenda involves the continued adaptation of the new developments in commercial marketing, whilst building a base of social marketing theory and best practice benchmarks that can be used to identify, clarify and classify the boundaries of social marketing against social change techniques.
• Nonprofit marketing is pursuing the dual research agenda of developing the theory and practice of social entrepreneurship whilst seeking deeper consumer‐based research to understand motivations for charitable behaviour and gift giving.
• Political Marketing's research agenda looks for an increase in the level of background research, core data and market research to use as a basis for developing more advanced theoretical and practical models. In addition, as political marketing is being transferred internationally between a range of political and electoral systems, there is a need for comparative research into both the relevance and effectiveness of these techniques to isolate nation independent and nation dependent political marketing strategies and campaigns.

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Numerical classification of curvilinear structures for the identification of pistol barrels

This paper demonstrates a numerical pattern recognition method applied to curvilinear image structures. These structures are extracted from physical cross-sections of cast internal pistol barrel surfaces. Variations in structure arise from gun design and manufacturing method providing a basis for discrimination and identification. Binarised curvilinear land transition images are processed with fast Fourier transform on which principal component analysis is performed. One-way analysis of variance (95% confidence interval) concludes significant differentiation between 11 barrel manufacturers when calculating weighted Euclidean distance between any trio of land transitions and an average land transition for each barrel in the database. The proposed methodology is therefore a promising novel approach for the classification and identification of firearms.     

Having a Bad Month: General Versus Specific Effects of Stress on Crime

We examine whether particular types of stress are related to particular types of crime or whether all types of stress are related to all types of crime. Our estimates are based on analyses of within-individual change over a 36 month period among recently incarcerated offenders. We find that assault is most strongly related to family stress, suggesting that conflicts between family members lead to assault. Economic crimes (property crimes and selling illicit drugs) are most clearly related to financial stress, suggesting that these crimes often reflect attempts to resolve financial problems. On the other hand, crime is generally unrelated to stress from illness/injury, death, and work. The results support the idea that criminal behavior is a focused response to specific types of problems rather than a general response to stress. They are more consistent with explanations that focus on perceived rewards and costs (e.g., the rational-choice approach) than with explanations that portray negative affect as a generalized impetus toward violence or crime (e.g., frustration aggression approaches).