The Legal Cartography of Colonization, the Legal Polyphony of Settlement: English Intrusions on the American Mainland in the Seventeenth Century

This essay investigates the first century of English colonization of the North American mainland, concentrating on the charters and letters patent that proponents of western planning secured over the course of the century. The elaborated legalities of chartering should be understood as a technology of planning and design. Charters allowed projectors both to justify their pursuit of particular territorial claims and to establish, with some precision, the conceptions of the appropriate, familiar, desired order of things and people that would be imposed onto uncharted social and physical circumstance.
The structures of authoritative sociolegal order planned by projectors encountered others implicit in the migrations of actual settlers. Investigating settlers'disagreement with and departure from projectors'designs, the essay discards common explanations—that these were inevitable corrections brought about by the intrusion of local environmental realities on English projectors'fantasies, or the realization of an implicit evolutionary logic of political development, or of legal reception. It argues that disagreements were more often the result of a collision of distinct English legal cultures brought, by migration, into an unavoidable proximity.
The essay counterposes the paradigm of "colonization" to both "common law reception" and "bottom-up localism" analyses of the formation of early American legal culture. It proposes that "colonization" also resolves the discontinuity between early (colonial) and later (U.S.) American history.     

From Intervention to Retrenchment: Poland's Strategic Culture and the 2011 Libyan Campaign

Abstract

The willingness of successive Polish governments to support and participate in US-led multilateral military interventions—such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq—has been explained in terms of Poland's prevailing strategic culture. Yet in 2011 Poland opted to exclude itself from participating in the NATO campaign against Libya. It is argued that this was not a counter-cultural decision, but was instead a case of one strategic subculture supplanting another. The support that the government received from opposition politicians and the press can be taken as evidence that the policy did not represent a radical departure from Poland's strategic culture.     

When does science persuade (or not persuade) in high-conflict policy contexts?

Researchers struggle to understand the relationship between science and policy positions, especially the complicated interplay among the various factors that might affect the acceptance or rejection of scientific information. This article presents a typology that simplifies and guides research linking scientific information to policy positions. We use the typology to examine how characteristics of both scientific information and policy actors' existing policy positions affect the likelihood of changing, maintaining or reinforcing those policy positions. We analyse data from surveys conducted in 2015 and 2017 of policy actors engaged in contested policy debates over shale oil and gas development in Colorado, US. Our findings confirm expectations that policy actors will most likely maintain and reinforce their policy positions in response to scientific information. Our data also show that changes in policy positions depend on policy actors' risk perceptions, perceived issue contentiousness, networks and experience with science.     

Covenanting for Nature: A Comparative Study of the Utility and Potential of Conservation Covenants

Conservation covenants over private land are extensively used in some jurisdictions to secure a wide range of public benefits: in some cases primarily to promote nature conservation, while elsewhere to foster conservation alongside greater public access to ‘green’ space. This article considers the use of conservation covenants in New Zealand, Scotland, and England and Wales. It argues that they can play a unique role in balancing nature conservation, property rights and increased public access to private land. It reviews proposals for new legislation in England and Wales and argues that, if it is to be successful, the potential of conservation covenants to secure greater public access to private land should be more strongly emphasised. Their successful use in New Zealand shows that, while recognising the important balancing function that they can perform, this emphasis is critically important if covenants are to fulfil their potential to ‘reconnect’ people and nature.     

Beyond COVID-19: Five commentaries on reimagining governance for future crises and resilience

Several Canadian and international scholars offer commentaries on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for governments and public service institutions, and fruitful directions for public administration research and practice. This second suite of commentaries considers the challenges confronting governments as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the decades to come with an increasingly broad lens: the need to understand and rethink the architecture of the state given recent and future challenges awaiting governments; the need to rethink government-civil society relations and policies to deliver services for increasingly diverse citizens and communities; the need for new repertoires and sensibilities on the part of governments for recognizing, anticipating, and engaging on governance risks despite imperfect expert knowledge and public skepticism; how the COVID-19 crisis has caused us to reconceive international and sub-national borders where new “borders” are being drawn; and the need to anticipate a steady stream of crises similar to the COVID-19 pandemic arising from climate change and related challenges, and develop new national and international governance strategies for fostering population and community resilience.     

Characterization and differentiation of aluminum powders used in improvised explosive devices – Part 1: Proof of concept of the utility of particle micromorphometry

Aluminum (Al) powders are commonly used in improvised explosive devices as metallic fuels, a component of explosive mixtures. These powders can be obtained readily from industrial‐scale and consumer products, and produced using unsophisticated “kitchen chemistry” techniques. This research demonstrates the potential of automated particle micromorphometry for comparisons between known source and questioned Al powders recovered from IEDs, as well as for insight into the method of Al powder manufacture. Al powder samples were obtained from legitimate manufacturers, and 56 samples were produced “in‐house” from Al‐containing spray paints and ball‐milled Al foils. Transmitted light microscope images of Al powder particles were acquired using an automated stage with automated z‐focus; 17 size and shape parameters were measured for all particles. Approximately 37,000–2,500,000 particles/sample were analyzed using an open‐source statistical package with customized code. Dimensionality reduction was required for processing the large datasets: eight of the 17 measured variables were selected based on inspection of the correlation matrix. Data from four subsamples from each of the 56 samples produced using “in‐house” methods were analyzed using ANOVA to assess the within‐ and between‐sample variation. High within‐sample variation was noted; however, ANOVA and post‐hoc Tukey's honestly significant difference (HSD) tests demonstrated that the between‐sample variation was substantially larger than the within‐sample variation. Each sample could be differentiated from all other samples in the test set. Future experiments will focus on ways to reduce the within‐sample variation, and additional statistical and microanalytical methods to classify sources and confidently constrain the method of Al powder manufacture.     

Full and Open Competition in Public Procurement: Values and Ethics in Contracting Opportunity

ABSTRACT

Governments have sought to respond to increasing pressures to accomplish aims with efficiency and at low cost. A perception of the potential for corruption and waste of public resources has been met with calls for transparency and accountability. Competition is believed to lead to impartial, optimal outcomes, but attention paid to competition in the literature suggests that the benefits are not universally clear. This paper considers ‘full and open competition’ as a policy promise, ethical obligation, and a matter of justice, drawing upon work of John Rawls and others, in the United States case. The research question is: What do Federal procurement data tell us about the nature of full and open competition in practice? This study draws upon contract data available from the U.S. Federal government, for fiscal years from 2015 to 2018. Through an ordinal regression, it is suggested that variation in the extent of competition results in part from size of project, size of the business (or potential business) receiving the project, and the industry classification, particularly in cases centering on commercial acquisitions. While ‘full and open competition’ is frequently employed, the difference between the normative value of the concept in statute, and practical outcomes in implementation, is clear. This difference has consequences for both vendors and the government.