Troubled Water

正Chinese fail to warm to how Americans serve their H2O By Yu Yan XINHU AINDISPENSIBLE THERMOS:A staff worker of Chengdu Railway Station checks the thermoses prepared for passengers in Chengdu,Sichuan Province,during the Spring Festival travel rush on January 30,2013     

Judicial Career Incentives and Court Performance: An Empirical Study of the German Labour Courts of Appeal

This paper examines how the organization of a civil-law judiciary—the German labour court system—shapes court performance. It is argued that civil-law judiciaries can be considered as internal labour markets in which the main incentive derives from career opportunities. Resulting hypotheses are tested on data for nine German Labour Courts of Appeal (Landesarbeitsgerichte) over the period 1980–1998. Two performance measures are computed: the confirmation rate and a productivity measure. The confirmation rate captures how often decisions are upheld in an appeal at the Federal Labour Court. Court productivity is measured by a score derived via data envelopment analysis (DEA) and includes as outputs the number of finished cases and the number of published decisions. Regression analyses show: Courts employing more judges with a Ph.D. are more productive, but write decisions that are less often confirmed by the Federal Labour Court. Courts employing judges with higher ex ante promotion probabilities are less productive and write decisions that are less often confirmed.JEL Classification: J45, K31, M12     

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.     

Adaptive management and adaptive governance in the everglades ecosystem

The Everglades is an intensively managed ecosystem where control of the water has allowed agricultural, urban and economic development, while struggling to meet biodiversity conservation goals. The over 100 year history of control began in response to a disastrous series of floods and droughts followed by environmental crises at an ecosystem scale. Each of these events precipitated technological fixes that extended control of water resources. Institutional structures have been continually reorganized over the last century to meet shifting social objectives, the latest of which is ecosystem restoration. However, the basic response, which employs engineering and technological solutions, is a type of social trap, where governmental mandates, planning-based paradigms and vested interests all interact to inhibit the resolution of chronic environmental issues. Experience from other resource systems indicates that in such an inherently complex system wrought with multiple uncertainties, restoration must be discovered through experimentation and learning embraced by adaptive management. Though minimal steps towards adaptive management have been made, we argue that adaptive forms of experimentation and governance are needed to resolve chronic resource issues and achieve restoration goals.     

“多源流框架”对中国政策过程的解释力——以江浙跨行政区水污染防治合作的政策过程为例

"多源流框架"作为西方公共政策过程分析中应用较为广泛的工具,对我国公共政策过程分析的解释力如何?通过跨行政区水污染矛盾比较突出、水污染防治合作具代表性的江浙边界为例,选取1993-2005年间较为典型的13次水污染事件,采用"多源流框架"为理论工具对事件的规律性进行归类梳理,分析江浙两省在跨行政区水污染防治合作中的政策过程.主要观点是:"多源流框架"在解释江浙边界跨行政区水污染防治合作的政策演变过程中具有一定适用性:"政策之窗"的打开,是问题、政策、政治三源流共同出现的结果;"政策之窗"未形成,是由于三源流中某一条或两条源流的缺失.同时,该理论在解释我国政策演变过程中,其解释力具有一定局限性:三源流并非彼此独立,各源流的出现存在一定先后顺序.因此,在使用"多源流框架"分析我国政策过程时,必须与政治体制、管理体制等特点相结合,才能更科学地分析我国公共管理过程中的政策问题.     

Economic Governance Beyond State and Market: Islamic Capital Markets in Southeast Asia

ABSTRACT

Islamic finance has become an integral part of the financial systems of the Muslim-majority countries of Southeast Asia. At the same time, Southeast Asia has witnessed the emergence of new capital market governance practices and arrangements that are both multi-scalar and multi-sited. This article suggests that rather than only looking at the scale and rescaling of capital market governance in the region, more attention needs to be paid to the shifting balances between regulatory expertise, market practice and societal expectations. Indeed, for governance practices to be considered effective, they have to straddle at times competing demands of authority and legitimacy. This dynamic is nowhere as visible as in the case of Islamic finance, which explicitly involves Shariah experts, trained in Islamic law, in its governance structures. This article explores the novel forms of governance to which this new market has given rise. It argues that Islamic finance – rather than the product of privately held beliefs – has become increasingly bound up with the state apparatus. This facilitates the embedding of Islamic financial principles and ethical concerns throughout capital markets in the region. Yet, Islamic finance has also become increasingly submerged within national development and competitiveness agendas.     

中日水法体系与管理机制的立法比较

日本的水法体系是在整体环境观指导下的统一水环境立法,在调整客体和调整方式上体现了整体环境保护观。从法律调整方式上看,整体环境观指导下的调整方式体现为水资源开发、利用和消费全过程的环境保护。日本的水资源管理体制能够及时有效地协调人力资源,有利于对污染源的及时处理。总结日本的经验,立足于我国国情,抓住我国当前治理水污染的重点,形成水资源开发利用、水环境污染控制、生态系统保护基本政策和原则的环境与资源统一的综合性的水法体系。同时依靠科学加强国际交流合作,培养高素质的环保人员从事环保工作,普及水资源保护知识,最终实现水资源的可持续利用。     

Trading in Dordoi and Lilo bazaars: frontiers of formality,entrepreneurship and globalization

ABSTRACT

Cross-border trade is central to the socio-economic structure of the former Soviet republics and their integration in the world economy. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, bazaars have functioned as nodes that enable multi-directional, cross-border trade. While there have been studies on the bazaar trade in the Soviet successor states, few have used quantitative methods. Drawing from 600 structured interviews with traders in Dordoi (Bishkek) and Lilo (Tbilisi), the data from Dordoi highlight the relationship between informality and entrepreneurship, unlike Lilo, where there are clearer markers of formality, but where bazaar trade also seems to be less profitable. The data from the 600 interviews illustrate that Dordoi functions as a globalized trading hub, its transnational linkages forged by the bazaar traders and the buyers themselves. By contrast, trade in Lilo is more localized. Hence, ‘globalization from below’ presents itself differently across the post-Soviet space.     

‘Only by learning how to live together differently can we live together at all’: readability and legibility of Central Asian migrants’ presence in urban Russia

ABSTRACT

This paper questions the effectiveness and usefulness of the Russian government's policies of migrant integration. Using a unique combination of ethnographic research methods (observations, interviews and survey) with methods from psychology (cognitive mapping) and urban studies (GIS mapping), I depict the presence of Central Asian migrants and their interaction with local long-term residents in two cities of the Russian Federation: Kazan and Saint Petersburg. On the basis of my findings, I argue that the readability (defined as the ease with which the city can be ‘read’ and understood) and legibility (defined as the degree to which individual components of an urban environment are recognizable by their appearance) of urban space in Kazan have positive effects on the relationship between these two communities, while the ambiguity and uncertainty of urban identity in Saint Petersburg make the life of migrants very vulnerable and unpredictable, and result in the growth of xenophobic views among the local residents. This allows me to argue that the policy of migrant integration will be more successful if it is built on learning to live with differences, instead of trying to ‘Russify’ migrants or create various forms of supra-ethnic identity.     

Collective Action for Smallholder Market Access: Evidence and Implications for Africa

It is widely acknowledged that the involvement of small farmers into markets can contribute to higher productivity and income growth, which in turn can enhance food security, poverty reduction efforts, and overall economic growth. In Africa, as in other parts of the developing world, agricultural production systems and their participants face significant challenges as a result of changing economic, environmental, and sociopolitical context. New dynamics in the global agricultural economy, such as the growth of supermarkets, are providing smallholders with both the new opportunities and new constraints to participate in and benefit from market exchanges. Collective action in the form of producer groups can enable African smallholders to take advantage of the new value chains and deal with existing market imperfections. However, certain conditions must be in place to create and sustain incentives for farmers to organize around marketing. Experiences from collective action in natural resource management (NRM) have shown that the types of markets and products, characteristics of user groups, institutional arrangements, and external environment need to be considered in order to determine the effectiveness and sustainability of collective marketing for smallholders. This paper applies the lessons from collective action in NRM to marketing, using existing case studies of producer groups in Africa, and offers policy recommendations on the factors that contribute to the success of collective marketing efforts.