Making the Harder Yards: Environmental Policy Integration in Australia

Solutions to environmental problems such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and land and water resource degradation require long term integration of economic, social and environmental policies. This poses challenges to specialised, hierarchical public administration systems. The study reported here examined strategies, structures and processes to enable environmental policy integration in six Australian states and territories, and some federal arrangements. The study found that the most prominent success factors, barriers and gaps that affect environmental policy integration relate to leadership, long term embedding of environmental policy integration and implementation capacity. Factors deserving further research and policy attention include leadership, cultural change and capacity building; embedding sustainability in structures and processes; development of a long term evidence based approach; strengthening decentralised implementation arrangements; and evaluation of policy integration initiatives.     

CRIMINAL ACHIEVEMENT, OFFENDER NETWORKS AND THE BENEFITS OF LOW SELF-CONTROL

This study follows recent research on criminal earnings and examines the impact of underlying traits (low self-control) and personal organization features (nonredundant networking) on the criminal earnings of a sample of incarcerated offenders previously involved in market and predatory crimes. Controlling for various background factors (age, noncriminal income, lambda and costs of doing crime), both low self-control and nonredundant networking independently explain why some offenders are more successful than others in achieving higher monetary standards through crime. Although efficient, brokerage-like networking enhances market offenders' earnings, low self-control emerges as an asset for predatory offenders: the lower their self-control, the higher their criminal earnings. For market offenders, however, low self-control has no direct effect, but it does mitigate the impact of effective networking on criminal earnings. The results emerging from this study have implications for Gottfredson and Hirschi's theory of crime and the advent of a criminal network perspective. Extensions are also made toward the conventional/criminal embeddedness framework and deterrence research.     

实践意识·制度结构·权力资源--从结构化理论看思想政治工作有效性问题

结构化理论是社会学中揭示个人行为与社会系统互动关系的重要理论之一.其中实践意识、结构性制约和权力资源配置的论述,对于我们进一步探寻教育者、受教育者、制度等思想政治工作变量间的内在联系,深入探讨如何增强思想政治工作有效性有着重要的启示作用.这表现在整合官兵的实践意识,为增强军队思想政治工作有效性提供坚实的思想基础;优化制度结构,为增强有效性提供科学的制度保障;合理运用权力资源,为增强有效性提供有力的权威支持.     

Intravenous Drug Use and HIV in Estonia: Socio-Economic Integration and Development of Indicators Regarding the Right to Health for its Russian-Speaking Population

This article seeks to highlight some potential indicators and benchmarks for the right to health under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, ratified by Estonia. These potential key indicators, as part of a human rights based approach to health indicators being developed by the UN Special Rapporteur, are argued to be particularly important in the context of the exceptionally high HIV rates among the Russian speaking population in Estonia. The historical emergence of the HIV epidemic in Estonia is traced, comparing its development with the situations in Latvia and Lithuania. This article describes the current extent of the HIV epidemic in Estonia which is the country with the highest reported number of HIV infections per capita in Europe, a number impacting in an extremely disproportionate fashion on its Russian-speaking population, particularly in North-Eastern Estonia. Understanding of the HIV epidemic in Estonia cannot exclude the social contextual factors of the social marginalization of many among the Russian-speaking population, the ‹alien’ status of those without citizenship of Estonia or any other State, and other failures of Estonian State policy with regard to intravenous drug use and HIV in the recent past. HIV among the prison population is also examined as disproportionately impacting upon Russian-speaking prisoners. It is argued that the language and logic of the Estonian State Integration Programme, as well as Estonia’s Second Report on the implementation of the Council of Europe Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities (2004) which refer to its Russian-speaking citizens as ‹non-Estonians’ is discrimination based on ethnic origin. In order to develop a system of State accountability in relation to the right to health, candidate indicators and benchmarks are proposed as structural, process and outcome indicators relevant to Estonia regarding the right to health and HIV, intravenous drug use, socio-economic integration and its Russian-speaking population. Dr. Paul Downes is Director of the Educational Disadvantage Centre, St. Patrick’s College, Drumcondra, Dublin, Ireland.     

乡镇企业改制中的法律问题

乡镇企业改制是对历史遗留问题的理顺,其中涉及到政府、集体组织其他成员、企业负责人及企业职工等各方利益。依法界定企业产权关系,充分体现并协调好各利益相关者权益是法治社会的基本要求。为此必须树立并提高各利益相关者的法律意识。     

Theoretical and Empirical Work on the Relationship Between Unemployment and Crime

Part of the ongoing debate between Cantor and Land and Greenberg centers on differing opinions about the question of interest in Cantor and Land (1985). We begin this article with our opinion that Cantor and Land's theory relates changes in the business cycle to changes in the aggregate rate of crime. We then question whether year-to-year changes adequately reflect changes in the business cycle, which last on average 4 years, and we refer to an article by Cook and Zarkin (1985) which presents an alternative method of measuring business cycle changes. We also discuss how Greenberg's use of cointegration provides an alternative way of addressing the difficult statistical problem of nonstationarity without resorting to first differences. Our final contribution involves noticing that opportunity and motivational theories of crime can be structurally identified by focusing on different types of crime rather than temporal lags. We demonstrate this idea by splitting car theft into joyriding and theft for profit. We show that joyriding appears to be driven by opportunity, while the causal structure of theft for profit is less clear.     

On Theory, Models, Model-Testing, and Estimation

I reply to comments and criticisms of my article raised in this Special Issue by Cantor and Land, Britt, O'Brien, Levitt, and Paternoster and Bushway.     

The EU's Climate Leadership: Reconciling Ambition and Reality

This article argues that while the EU aspires to and is capable of structural, directional and instrumental leadership in the global climate regime, it thus far has not fully utilized this potential. Partly this is because the EU's shortcomings with respect to implementation have reduced the credibility of its leadership, partly because the complex internal negotiations tend to divert attention away from consideration of the impacts of its negotiation position on other countries. Nonetheless, the EU is moving the regime-building process forward. It is recommended that if the EU wishes to continue acting as a leader, it then needs to combine the three types of leadership with a short, medium and long-term strategy.     

Study on the Structural Relationship between Leisure Constraints and Recreation Specialization: A Case Study of Campers

Leisure constraints and recreation specialization are two important issues of the recreation behavior research. It is helpful to clarify the relationship for promoting the level and quality of recreation participation. Through constructing structural equation model and acquainting the data of campers, the paper empirically tests the relationship between leisure constraints and recreation specialization. The conclusions are as follows. Firstly, the higher the level of leisure constraints, the negative impact of recreation specialization is stronger. Secondly, behavior, knowledge, skills, and loyalty can well reflect recreation specialization level of the campers. Thirdly, camping activity participation is affected relatively small by external factors; however, individual internal psychological factors and interaction with others are very important to recreation specialization.     

Social innovation driven by citizen-led digital innovation: technologies of citizenship and the war on unemployment in Flanders

ABSTRACT

Citizens’ participation in technology design is increasingly deployed as a means to tackle social issues and a technique of empowerment. Techniques of empowerment belong to a set of strategies and methods employed by governmental and nonprofit organizations to constitute active, participatory citizens. This contribution exposes the political rationalities underpinning emerging initiatives that perpetuate citizens’ subjection by deploying participation as their essential governing technology. It analyses an initiative developed by a Belgian nonprofit organization to involve citizens in the design and development of digital tools to tackle unemployment. Findings unveil the potential downsides of participatory practices of technology design for social innovation. Critical reflections invite practitioners to pay greater attention to their design and implementation towards making them truly empowering processes.