Who teaches and who learns? Policy learning through the C40 cities climate network

This study examines the network structure of policy learning in the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, which is a network of the world??s largest cities committed to tackling climate change issues. Among forty members and nineteen affiliate members, we ask the question with whom do cities learn and why? How are policy-learning relationships associated with cities?? multi-stakeholder governing body, policy performance, and cultural similarities? While studies on learning have analyzed conditions facilitating learning, quantitative studies of local government learning in global networks are rare. To facilitate the investigation into learning, we conceptualize learning as a process comprising information seeking, adoption and policy change, and focus on information seeking as the foundation step in the learning process. This social network analysis using the exponential random graph model reveals the cities that seek information and those that are information sources are different subgroups. Furthermore, analysis of nodal attributes suggests that transmunicipal learning in the C40 network is facilitated by the presence of a multi-stakeholder governing body; homophily of culture (language and regional proximity); and higher level of climate change policy performance. Creating a multi-stakeholder governing body could ensure participatory representativeness from citizens and relevant stakeholders to enhance climate change policy engagement and decision making as well as policy learning.     

Tolerance and economic growth revisited: a note

Berggren and Elinder (BE) in this journal write on the relationship between the degree of tolerance in a nation and its rate of economic growth. They are disturbed to find in their cross sections that faster economic growth statistically goes together with intolerance of homosexuals. In this comment, we revisit the issue and demonstrate that the concern expressed by BE is unwarranted if we properly account for ??conditional convergence?? in the regressions for economic growth. Other things being equal, a country grows faster if it starts from a poorer initial position. In the BE dataset, China since the Deng reforms is a prime example. At about the same time, another group of countries managed to accelerate their economic growth after a long period of stagnation: the ex-communist countries in central and Eastern Europe. Many of these nations also grew exceptionally fast for a number of years, once freedom had been regained and the initial chaos overcome. With simple modeling of these historical initial conditions, we find no statistical pattern that associates bias against homosexuals with weaker economic growth. Our results are robust under alternative specifications.     

The Mixed Blessings of National Integration: New Perspectives on Development in Vietnam’s Northern Uplands

The ethnic minorities of Southeast Asia’s uplands, including those of Vietnam, tend to be portrayed as excluded from national society and locked into poverty, environmental degradation and positions of subjugation. Recent debates about Southeast Asian uplands-lowlands relations have questioned this discourse by highlighting the diversity of experiences, the agency of ethnic minority groups, and uplanders’ strategies of state evasion. This article finds that the integration of the uplands into the Vietnamese polity should be understood as an ongoing struggle between nation-building and state expansion characterised by grand visions on the one hand, and incomplete policy implementation and uplanders’ ambiguous stance towards integration on the other.     

Die Interzedentenwarnung nach § 25c KSchG

§ 25c KSchG legt in Satz 1 eine Informationsobliegenheit des Unternehmers gegenüber dem Verbraucher im Fall einer Interzession fest. Danach hat der Unternehmer den interzedierenden Verbraucher auf die wirtschaftliche Lage des Schuldners hinzuweisen, wenn er erkennt oder erkennen muss, dass der Schuldner seine Verbindlichkeit voraussichtlich nicht oder nicht vollst?ndig erfüllen wird. Unterl?sst der Unternehmer diese Information, haftet der Interzedent nur, wenn er seine Verpflichtung trotz einer solchen Information übernommen h?tte (§ 25c S 2 KSchG). Der folgende Beitrag besch?ftigt sich unter intensiver Berücksichtigung der jüngeren Judikatur mit den vielf?ltigen Aspekten der Interzedentenschutzvorschrift des § 25c KSchG, nicht zuletzt auch mit dem Mysterium der "echten Mitschuld".     

Ausfallshaftung und Kaduzierung

Eine jüngst ergangene Entscheidung des OGH (6 Ob 204/11k wbl 2012, 291) bietet Anlass, über das Verh?ltnis der Ausfallshaftung (§ 70 GmbHG) zum Kaduzierungsverfahren (§ 66 GmbHG) nachzudenken. Die Rechtsfrage lautet: Bedarf die Geltendmachung der Ausfallshaftung der vorherigen Durchführung eines Kaduzierungsverfahrens?     

The Prevalence and Correlates of Depression and Hopelessness among Sex Offenders Subject to Community Notification and Residence Restriction Legislation

Little research has investigated the prevalence of mood disturbance among sex offenders despite the fact that psychological distress may bear some relationship to community reintegration, and ultimately, recidivism. All offenders on New Jersey’s sex offender Internet registry were mailed surveys about their experiences with, and perceptions of, notification and residence restriction statutes, the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II), and the Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS). On average, respondents (N = 104) reported mild to moderate levels of depressive symptoms (M _BDI = 17.1) and hopelessness (M _BHS = 6.9). Additionally, offenders who reported being negatively affected by residence restrictions and notification statutes reported higher levels of both depression and hopelessness. Given evidence that sex offender specific legislation may de-stabilize offenders, this research highlights the importance of managing affective states in this population.