Cultural heritage conservation during emergency management: luxury or necessity?

Annually, natural disasters cause loss of life, damage to property, and damage to the environment. Concomitant is damage to the cultural heritage property, both items and places. Yet in the wake of a disaster, containment and response efforts put additional cultural resources at risk--usually due to ignorance rather than malice on the part of the disaster manager or the property owners. This paper reviews the effects of natural disasters on heritage sites and argues for increased awareness and training for disaster managers.     

Legislative Transparency and Credit Risk

Open governance requirements are designed to improve accountability, which implies that transparent governments are more trustworthy stewards of their publicly invested power. However, transparency may also reduce institutional effectiveness and inhibit political compromise, diminishing the capacity to manage resources responsibly. We assess empirical support for these competing perspectives in the context of American state legislatures, many of which have become exempt from state sunshine laws in recent decades. We leverage variation in the timing of these legislative exemptions to identify the effect of removing transparency in a crucial governing institution on investors’ risk perceptions of states’ general obligation bonds. Our analysis of these data during the period 1995–2010 suggests that removing legislative transparency reduces state credit risk. We conclude that while openness in government may be normatively desirable, shielding legislative proceedings from public view may actually be better for states’ debt repayment capacity, improving their overall fiscal health.     

Peaceful and Sustainable Development? Middle-Management Entrepreneurship and Transnational Competence in China

With deeper integration into the global economy and expanded penetration by multinational firms and other nonChinese actors following accession to the WTO, skills in bureaucratic entrepreneurship are not likely to be sufficient by themselves to bring about China’s sustainable development. In today’s interdependent and highly competitive trade, economic-cooperation, and resource-limited environment, sustainable development requires that subnational managers also possess transnational competence in collaborating with, negotiating with, and transforming foreign counterparts. However, survey research among Chinese executives based in Shanghai revealed that only a small proportion of the reporting current and future managers recognized the growing importance for China of an interculturally competent workforce. Without increased attention to enhancing the transnational competence of government and state-enterprise managers, peaceful and ecologically sound development will be difficult to sustain given the demands of multinational production chains, global resource constraints, and the challenges involved in managing transnational relations in the interest of China’s long-term economic progress.

Knowledge hubs along the Straits of Malacca

World history has known areas of relative isolation and areas of high intensity of cultural interaction. The Mediterranean Sea, the Silk Road or the Straits of Malacca can be cited as such crucial contact zones. Within these areas, centres sprung up that served as interfaces between cultures and societies. These “hubs” as we would like to call them, emerged at various points throughout the contact zones, rose to prominence and submerged into oblivion due to a variety of natural calamities or political fortunes. This paper assesses the rise and fall of trade and knowledge hubs along the Straits of Malacca from before colonialisation until today. Historical hubs of maritime trade and religiosity today increasingly establish themselves as educational and knowledge hubs. This leads us to speak of the Straits of Malacca as a chain of—not pearls—but knowledge hubs with Singapore as the knowledge hub in the region shining the brightest of all, as the data suggest. We aim to conceptually grasp this development by suggesting a model or at least a hypothesis about the rise and movement of knowledge hubs in general.

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Post‐1994 South Africa's peacekeeping and military intervention in Southern Africa,reference from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Lesotho

South Africa, once a pariah state as a result of the apartheid regime destabilization policies in Southern Africa, became a full fledge democratic state following the victory of the African National Congress (ANC) in the first and all‐inclusive democratic elections of 1994. The ANC's vision for Southern Africa was to be routed on the notion of curbing the imbalances of the past (pre‐1994), which had cost the Southern African region great economic loss. Here, one of the many fundamentals that were to drive the ANC's foreign policy doctrine was that of conflict resolution for a more stable and prosperous Africa particularly Southern Africa. Conflict resolution was viewed as a pivotal element for the new democratic government in order to stimulate beneficial relations with other African states post the apartheid era. In light of the above, and using a qualitative method approach, this paper draws a nuanced appraisal and examines the role of South Africa's peacekeeping and mediation initiatives in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Lesotho post‐1994. In conclusion, South Africa has been able to utilize its regional hegemonic stance to ensure regional security while ensuring economic stability at home.