A Review of “Setting the Standard: Certification,Governance, and the Forest Stewardship Council”

Abstract

As the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) establishes itself as one of the premier regimes in international law, member states are increasingly availing themselves of the significant dispute settlement provisions found in Part XV. The International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) is beginning to take its place in the pantheon of major international tribunals. Although its jurisprudence thus far has largely consisted of applications for prompt release of vessels, these cases have arisen from disagreements over fishery practices and the enforcement of fishery laws by coastal states. The ITLOS is developing into a transparent, consistent and speedy forum to adjudicate marine disputes arising from UNCLOS. While the overall scope and reach of Part XV may be uncertain at the present time, especially vis‐à‐vis other dispute settlement institutions, the early activity under Part XV is promising. Those concerned with marine wildlife issues should be encouraged by the potential of Part XV, the ITLOS in particular, to serve as an effective regime in the realm of marine wildlife dispute settlement.     

Government-to-Government Contracting: Stewardship,Agency, and Substitution

ABSTRACT

This paper provides empirical evidence detailing the distinctive nature of service delivery provided through contracts with other governments. The results of a survey of Ohio city and county managers both confirm and stand in contrast to implications derived from stewardship theory. Consistent with stewardship, our data demonstrate that contracts with public sector service partners generate less intensive monitoring by contracting governments than do services contracted with private entities. In contrast to stewardship theory, we find that contracting governments do not use other governments for services requiring intensive monitoring. In an era of accountability and results-oriented management, reliance on trust may not satisfy constituents who seek evidence of effective service delivery. The inability of the contracting government to affect another government's service delivery reduces the attractiveness of that government as a contracting partner. If the tools of stewardship prove to be inadequate, the imposition of carrots and sticks appropriate for a principal-agent relationship could undermine the trust central to stewardship. Given these tensions, it is not surprising that governments are contracting less with other governments.     

The Canadian Government Response to Africa's Refugee Problem

La Côte d’Ivoire a longtemps fait figure de pays marginal et d’importance secondaire sur la scène islamique ouest-africaine, du fait notamment du statut minoritaire de l’Islam — une réalité qui se situe désormais moins au plan démographique qu’au plan politique — et de la discrétion des ordres soufis. De manière contrastée, depuis les années 1990, la société musulmane ivoirienne et sa culture religieuse “réformiste,” portée par une élite “moderne” centrée sur Abidjan, gagnent progressivement en influence dans la sous-région et au-delà. Cet article explore les processus socioéconomiques, politiques et culturels à l’oeuvre dans cette transformation, ainsi que l’interface entre le local et le global dans l’Islam ivoirien. Les migrations internationales vers la Côte d’Ivoire sont l’objet d’une attention particulière, dans la mesure où les nombreux immigrants ouest-africains, pour la plupart musulmans, ont pu jouer à l’étranger un rôle de traducteurs culturels dans la transmission des idées et du modus operandi propres aux réformistes ivoiriens. L’émigration de musulmans ivoiriens en Occident et en particulier aux Etats-Unis est aussi prise en compte. L’article se demande en outre pourquoi l’élite réformiste ivoirienne s’est efforcée de nouer des contacts avec des organismes islamiques internationaux basés hors du monde arabe et de l’Iran et comment les échanges avec les musulmans d’Occident ont marqué son développement de manière décisive et originale. Ces mouvements d’hommes et d’idées ont contribué au dynamisme local de l’Islam ivoirien et à son rayonnement transnational en Afrique de l’Ouest francophone et dans les milieux de la diaspora africaine musulmane aux Etats-Unis. La conclusion situe cette mondialisation de l’Islam ivoirien dans une perspective historique.     

Infant and child mortality in developing countries: Analysing the data for Robust determinants

Is development best achieved by going for growth, or does specific attention need to be paid to directly improving human welfare? In contrast to the Human Development Reports of the UNDP, the World Bank has stressed the growth approach. Recent work has reinforced this position by arguing that health spending is extremely ineffective in reducing infant or child mortality, which is mainly explained by a country's income per capita. This article contests this position through testing the robustness of determinants of infant and child mortality. We have estimated over 420,000 equations which show that, while income per capita is a robust determinant of infant and child mortality, so are indicators of health, education and gender inequality. Some health spending, such as immunisation, is thus shown to be cost effective way of saving lives. Our results are consistent with the view that much health spending in developing countries may be poorly targeted or otherwise ineffective, but do not support the position that public health strategies should not be given too great a role in pursuing improvements in human welfare.     

Ukraine's relations with the west: disinterest,partnership, disillusionment

Ukraine's relations with the West have gone through three periods of development since 1992. When relations with Ukraine have improved this has tended to be at the same time as relations between the West and Russia declined, and vice-versa. The first period is disinterest during 1992–94 when the West prioritised relations with a reformist Russia. The second period was 1995–99 when Ukraine and the West developed a strategic partnership. From 2000, Ukraine's relations with the West are best described as disillusionment due to the growing gap between official rhetoric of integration into Euro-Atlantic structures and Eurasian domestic policies.     

Exporting and importing criminality: Incarceration of the Foreign Born

Since previous studies have found that crime rates vary by immigrant group there is a need to dis‐aggregate immigrants by country of birth in order to obtain a more accurate representation of the relationship between migrants and crime. This study examines data from six countries (Australia, Canada, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the U.S.A.) on the country of birth of their inmate populations. The following observations are reasonable conclusions from the data available. First, the percentages of each home country's inmate population that is foreign‐born varies remarkably. Second, in general foreign‐born inmates tend to come from regions outside the region within which the host country was located, though in most cases from regions that were proximate. Third, given the small number of countries reporting, it is intriguing that just a small number of countries and regions can account for such a high proportion of a home country's inmate population if one includes the numbers of a country's citizens who are housed in foreign prisons as part of that original country's inmate population. The paper concludes with a discussion of a number of policy implications that flow from these findings.     

History,memory and nation building in the post-Soviet colonial space

This is an article on Bolshevik nationalities policy and ethnic engineering, asking who, in fact, decided which populations belonged together as ethnic groups (narodnost') and thus had the right of national self-determination, and how the level of autonomy was determined for each ethnic unit. Scholars have dealt with Russian and Soviet nationalities issues for decades already, but they have turned their attention mainly to the larger nationalities (at the level of SSR, and to a lesser degree the levels of ASSR and autonomous oblast). I argue that the lower levels of national territorial autonomy in the Soviet Union (national okrug, raion, volost', and selsovet) are worthy of greater academic attention, at least from the ethnological point of view. Having this kind of low-level territorial autonomy has often been a question of to be or not to be for the small ethnic groups concerned, and hence the subject is connected with the question of preservation of cultural and linguistic diversity in Russia.     

Geopolitical pluralism in the CIS: The emergence of GUUAM

This article argues that the 12 states of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) are evenly divided into two groups that are grouped around Russia and Ukraine. The emergence of these two groups, one of which is decidely pro‐Western and pro NATO ‐GUUAM (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Moldova) ‐is a sign of what Brzezinski defined as early as 1994 as geopolitical pluralism has finally emerged in the former USSR. US policy, he argued, should be the consolidation of this geopolitical pluralism within the former Soviet Union as the means by which a non‐imperial, ‘normal’ Russian nation‐state would emerge with whom a ‘genuine American‐Russian partnership’ could be secured. Brzezinski signalled that Ukraine was the key state that prevented the revival of a new Russian empire and therefore aided the consolidation of Russian democracy. One could add that GUUAM, as an organization led by Ukraine, should also therefore play a central role in US and Western policy towards the former USSR.