Challenges in Implementing Justice Research in the Allocation of Natural Resources

Water reform in Australia has demanded that water usage for irrigation operates in an environmentally sustainable manner. It has resulted in the need to reduce allocations in some local communities, and to date government policy has relied on economic instruments to take the lead in developing equitable processes to do this. A series of community-based justice studies were undertaken and demonstrated that it is possible to derive a package of actions, which reflect the fairness judgments of the vast majority of the community. However, the implementation of these actions within the decision-making process has proven to be a more complex matter. This paper discusses four professional, methodological, and ethical challenges for all justice researchers. It concludes by noting the applicability of this form of research in other natural resource allocation dilemmas. Therefore it is imperative that justice researchers confidently insert themselves in to environmental policy debates. Only in this way will the social criteria for triple bottom line accounting for sustainable development be adequately represented.     

The implications of differences between employer and worker employment/earnings reports for policy evaluation

Differences in administrative (UI) and survey (S) records on employment and earnings have substantial implications for assessing the impact of a variety of public interventions, such as welfare‐to‐work and employment training programs, and especially the state‐oriented welfare reform legislation of 1996. We use data from the 1998 and 1999 waves of the Child Support Demonstration Evaluation (CSDE) Resident Parent Surveys to explore individual differences between survey and UI employment and earnings reports for a Wisconsin sample of current and former welfare recipients. After exploring the potential causes of misreports from both sources, we document the degree of discrepancy between survey and UI earnings and employment measures and assess the difference between the two earnings measures in estimates of simple human capital (earnings) functions. Last, we evaluate the correspondence of the two measures with “hardship” indicators of economic well‐being.