Holding Back the Storm: Target Populations and State Climate Adaptation Planning in America

This paper investigates the landscape of state‐level adaptation planning in the United States. We answer three primary research questions: First, how are states planning for climate change? Second, who are states targeting for climate adaptation? Third, what tools are states using to motivate climate adaptation efforts? We develop and implement a coding scheme using Schneider and Ingram’s Social Construction Framework (SCF) to characterize variation in 2033 individual adaptation goals mentioned in all 14 American states with explicit adaptation plans. We use these data to understand the types of tools used to motivate different actors (governmental, private, nonprofit) to adapt to climate change. We find that the most frequent target of state adaptation planning is the state itself, which provides an opportunity to extend the SCF to a target group often not mentioned in public policy. Specifically, we find that states target themselves with mandates or tools designed to acquire information. Other stakeholders in adaptation are more likely to be the targets of capacity building tools. Private actors are the only population more likely to be targeted by incentives. The project expands the Social Construction Framework to include targets and tools of planning efforts. Practically, our article offers a methodology by which to compare the vastly heterogeneous efforts to adapt to climate change at the subnational level.     

Agriculture in Shifting Climates: The Configuration and Ripeness of Problem Understandings in Uganda and Senegal

The international community has advocated the adoption of climate‐smart agriculture (CSA) as lower‐income countries deal with the negative consequences of climate change. Scaling up such policies, practices, and programs successfully will require support from a variety of local stakeholders. Such support requires alignment between CSA solutions and the problem understandings of stakeholders. However, problem understandings can differ across individuals, stakeholder groups, and geographic areas. Consequently, we examine understandings of climate problems and socioeconomic and infrastructure problems related to agriculture among different stakeholder groups in Uganda and Senegal. We operationalized and measured these problem understandings following the detailed guidance of the political will and public will approach for analyzing social change. Semistructured interviews elicited stakeholder‐generated lists of problems for each group. Limited quantification of problem understandings and their relative importance or “ripeness” demonstrates how contexts might shape opportunities for CSA.     

Responses to the Clean Power Plan: Factors Influencing State Decision‐Making

In 2015, President Obama introduced the Clean Power Plan (CPP), a federal plan aimed at reducing the production of carbon pollution from power plants. In response, some used legal action to try and stop the plan, while others supported the plan and proceeded with plans for its implementation. This research investigates responses taken by state government in terms of legal remedies and planning for implementation, and what explains those responses. Findings suggest that partisanship plays a key role. Specifically, the partisanship of the attorney general is correlated with the legal response, and the governor with implementation planning. Coals, and perhaps renewables, also seem to play a role, even controlling for partisanship. There is only weak evidence for the effect of policy experience and none for the estimated cost of the policy. The article concludes by discussing the implications of these results for the future of climate policy in the United States.     

The Role of Scientific Excellence in the Changing Meaning of Maize in Mexico

Making policy is giving a meaning to objects. This perspective on policy making gained importance in the 1990s with the emergence of discursive approaches. In this article, we use the concepts of Hajer's discourse coalition approach to shed light on the evolving meaning of maize in Mexican society. Specifically, we trace a parallel between the evolution of biotechnology policy and discourses on maize over a 25‐year period. The article argues that until recently, the protection against biotechnological manipulations enjoyed by maize has been bolstered by a discourse granting the plant a special status in the country's history. However, the emergence of a new discourse grounded on the practice of scientific excellence is now challenging the old perspectives, and also finding support among government officials. As a result, the Mexican policies granting maize special protection is changing, and this policy change will likely trigger changes in the symbolic meaning of maize.     

How stalled global reform is fueling regionalism: China’s engagement with the G20

In the Chinese view, the architecture of contemporary global governance – especially that of the Bretton Woods institutions – is flawed and in need of reform. Developing nations (like China), the argument runs, need to be given a role proportionate to their global economic influence. Since the Group of Twenty (G20) became a leaders’ summit in 2008, China has used the forum to push for such reform. But today, despite some supposed progress, reform has stalled. Recognising this fact, China is increasingly emphasising regional integration in its strategy for overcoming the middle-income trap. Global reform has not been abandoned, but – given its infeasibility – is no longer a short-term priority.     

Elizabeth von Arnim’s The Pastor’s Wife: A Reassessment

Abstract

The Pastor’s Wife (1914) may seem at first reading simply another depiction of a woman struggling for liberation in the decades following the work of Thomas Hardy and Henrik Ibsen, being the story of how Ingeborg Bullivant escapes from an English patriarchal home, only to find herself trapped in another one in Germany. The novel, however, marks a turning point in Elizabeth von Arnim’s career; it is a novel that looks back to previous themes while anticipating those to come. It demonstrates, with comedy and bitterness, themes of alienation and exile; satirizes German codes and class; and provides a lyrical Romantic vision of the natural world. It also presents the married woman as a prisoner in a way that anticipates Vera (1921). The novel can also stand alone as an underrated classic that plays an important part in the history of English literature. Published at the beginning of high modernism, it shows, unlike the work of some canonized writers of the time, a fusion of realism and modernism. This essay argues that the novel is a proto-feminist work that is radical in its portrayal of women’s experience and influenced by literary naturalism in its childbirth scenes, but pessimistic about possibilities for change. The essay shows how the novel is modernist in its depiction of the alienated experience of the city; uses nineteenth-century realism in its narrative structure and comedy; and yet is forward-looking in its use of endings. A book that begins as a comedy but ends as a tragedy, The Pastor’s Wife deserves equal recognition with the work of H. G. Wells and E. M. Forster, writers with whom von Arnim was connected and by whom she was influenced.     

论应用ISO9000标准建立文档一体化质量管理体系

本文认为参照ISO9000国际质量标准,建立和健全档案质量管理体系是档案工作发展的一个珏然趋势。并通过对ISO9000标准的介绍来对档案工作如何建立质量管理体系提出建议。