Killing the MLFfithe Wilson government and nuclear sharing in Europe, 1964-66

This article investigates the claim of Britain's Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, to have 'killed' the Multilateral Force, an attempt to bring about nuclear sharing within NATO and answer the supposed German desire for equality of status. Earlier accounts have often seen the Multilateral Force as being abandoned, largely thanks to shifts in American policy, in late 1964. The case argued here is that the proposal continued to tax the alliance well into 1966, that important elements in the American and German governments continued to support it and that the British do deserve some credit for bringing the whole idea to an end. In particular the launch of an alternative proposal (the 'Atlantic Nuclear Force'), Wilson's readiness to argue with Washington and Bonn, and the exploitation of French withdrawal from NATO in 1966 proved important, even if British opposition was only one of several factors working against nuclear sharing. In the process he was also able to neutralise the dangers posed to him in the domestic political sphere by the debate over nuclear weapons.     

Community care as a penal sanction

Conclusion The community participation model, which rests on the philosophy of reintegration, is an important trend in recent penal policy. The sentence of community care in New Zealand is an illustration of that trend. However, there are lessons to be learned from the past four years. Clearly, the model has its practical limits. The extent to which the community wishes to participate in the provision of penal services is undoubtedly overstated by its proponents; as a result, community involvement is unlikely to be forthcoming unless the government provides adequate funding to groups and individuals providing such services to offenders. Even then, a gap is likely to remain between the rhetoric and the reality of community participation. The majority of the community care programs are bureaucratically organized, professionally staffed, and undertaken within the context of structured thera peutic regimes. They thus fall well short of the ideal of spontaneous, neighborly concern, which is such a strong part of the Western ideology of community. While some programs, particularly cultural programs offered by ethnic minority groups, have involved comparatively noninstitutional and informal relationships between sponsor and offender, these are few in number and have made little impact so far on the way in which the criminal justice system deals with offenders from ethnic minority groups. In sum, there is little to distinguish the majority of programs from conventional attempts at rehabilitation. Although higher levels of funding and more vigorous community development efforts by probation officers may stimulate community involvement, the New Zealand experience suggests that, at least in cultures without established processes of informal care and control, the community participation model will not be the new panacea in penal policy.This is a revised and expanded version of a paper given at the second conference of the Society for the Reform of Criminal Law, Parliament Buildings, Ottawa, Canada, August 1–4, 1988.B.A., University of Auckland 1971; LL.B. (hons.) University of Auckland 1973; Ph.D., Cambridge University 1978.     

Environmental Governance: The Role of Institutions in Causing and Confronting Environmental Problems

This article describes and explains in accessible terms major findings arising from the work of the long-term international research project on the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change (IDGEC). In analyzing the roles institutions play in both causing and confronting environmental problems, the project directs attention to three analytic themes – known as the problems of fit, interplay, and scale – and seeks to illuminate these concerns through empirical studies of marine, terrestrial, and atmospheric systems. IDGEC science has highlighted the pervasiveness of institutional misfits and begun to identify the reasons why misfits often prove difficult to eliminate, even when their existence becomes widely known. Research conducted under the auspices of the project demonstrates the growing impact of national and even international institutions on the effectiveness of local resource regimes. Similarly, IDGEC research has identified reasons why policy instruments that work well at the national level (e.g., tradable permits) are frequently difficult or impossible to transfer to the international level. To make the discussion of these findings concrete, the project has explored the problem of fit with particular reference to the performance of Exclusive Economic Zones, the problem of interplay through an analysis of the fate of tropical forests, and the problem of scale through an account of the limits of emissions trading as a policy instrument in the climate change regime.