Suchergebnisse

A close examination of venues for participatory environmental governance reveals highly constrained settings for citizen engagement. This situation is documented within the broader social milieu by Skocpol as a narrowing of public life which is characterized in this paper by professional, stakeholder, and elitist forms of participatory environmental governance. Case-study evidence is presented from three different governance settings in Canada (environmental assessment, land-use planning, and forest management) identifying two distinct types of elitism: elite representation by design and elite representation by procedure. Two options are presented as a response to this analysis. One option involves accepting elitism by strengthening the linkages between stakeholders and constituencies, and the other option involves fighting elitism by drawing on modes of community-based decision, deliberative activism, and promoting research that highlights the consequences of environmental elitism.

The absence of clear signals from the Norwegian state concerning climate change adaptation provides an opportunity to investigate why some municipalities have addressed adaptation to climate change while others have not. Although difficulties associated with implementing adaptation to climate change are well documented, less is known about those individuals who take the lead. On the basis of in-depth interviews and interaction with eight Norwegian municipalities that have begun working with climate adaptation, we examine how climate adaptation has been added to the local agenda. We find that adaptation planning has progressed more in those municipalities where officials are engaged and actively seeking external expertise and support. We conclude that, without a clearer national adaptation policy and greater resource allocation and legislation, adaptation to climate change within Norwegian municipalities is unlikely to progress further.

The process of urbanisation has historically been associated with both socioeconomic development and social strain. Although there is little evidence that urbanisation per se increases the likelihood of conflict or violence in a country, in recent decades Africa has experienced exceptional rates of urban population growth in a context of economic stagnation and poor governance, producing conditions conducive to social unrest and violence. In order to improve urban security in the years ahead, the underlying risk factors must be addressed, including urban poverty, inequality, and fragile political institutions. This, in turn, requires improving urban governance in the region by strengthening the capacity of local government institutions, addressing the complex political dynamics that impede effective urban planning and management, and cultivating integrated development strategies that involve cooperation between various tiers and spheres of government and civil society.

Society requires new forms of science and technology to productively accommodate the intrinsic value-laden judgments needed to manage the high uncertainties and considerable long-term impacts of sustainable urban planning. Responses to these 'wicked' problems include the development of postnormal science in the early 1990s. In subsequent literature on postnormal sustainability technologies, multiactor approaches to decision making are beginning to emerge. I examine an example: the development in New Zealand of a 100-year vision: the Auckland Sustainability Framework. Developed over fifteen months through 'messy' consultation across stakeholders, it has provided a clumsy' outcome, namely one which enabled multiple viewpoints to be expressed and responded to by others. The process adopted offers evidence in support of the development of sustainability frameworks over much longer timescales than the current norm in local authorities, and indications of how such processes may unfold.

Although efficiency theories have been adopted by governments around the world to improve public services, Hong Kong escaped their prescriptions until recently. In order to evaluate why such policies have been adopted, the authors develop a theory-led evaluation in which public choice theory and transaction-costs economics are synthesised to present a contingent efficiency framework. The study is focused upon the housing, planning, and lands arena, and includes analysis of policy documents and interviews with a range of civil servant, politicians, professional bodies, and private sector providers. The findings indicate that efficiency theories now explain institutional reform in Hong Kong—the variables of competition, size, asset specificity, monopoly, and change in public officials, together with the context within which public organisations in Hong Kong work, explain why such policies have now been pursued.

The vast majority of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) across EU and OECD regions are medium-to-low-tech firms, and by far the main type of innovation that SMEs undergo can be described as incremental innovations whereby small changes in processes or management procedures are ongoing over a period of time. Despite this, regional innovation initiatives are recognised to be narrowly focused as well as biased towards high-tech firms and 'radical' innovations whilst incremental innovation assumes a secondary role. If SMEs are to achieve their growth potential, and especially manufacturing-based SMEs, we argue that an incremental approach to innovation, at least initially, is crucial. It is our contention that higher education institutions—by virtue of their knowledge base, mentoring capabilities, and access to resources—should seek to position themselves as key 'practical implementation' players for this form of regional innovation. On the basis of research and practical implementation projects carried out in medium-to-low-tech SMEs located in the UK North West, we present an interventionist framework to assist manufacturing-based SMEs to develop and implement sustainable agile growth strategies, and consider the policy implications of such an approach.

Dienstleistungen prägen die Wirtschaftsstruktur und Arbeitslandschaft der Industriestaaten. Charakteristisch für Dienstleistungen ist, dass ihre Abgabe auf die Mitwirkung des Abnehmers angewiesen ist. Die Ursachen für ihre Expansion sind vielschichtig und können ihren spezifischen Nachfrage- und Angebotsbedingungen zugeordnet werden. Besonders dynamisch sind die unternehmensorientierten Dienstleistungen. Dienstleistungen weisen zudem eine ausgeprägte räumliche Konzentration auf. Einigen Dienstleistungen wird darüber hinaus eine besondere Bedeutung für die Wettbewerbsfähigkeit der regionalen Wirtschaft zugeschrieben.

The book provides a systematic review of research results on regional economic competitiveness, and constructs an evaluation index system based on nine key aspects: the development of a micro-economy; industrial development; enterprise strength; the sciences; education; innovation; environment governance and protection; financial development; and the degree of opening to the outside world. The book subsequently provides policy suggestions on how to enhance the economic and social development of the West of China based on a comprehensive evaluation and analysis. In addition to comparing the recent social development of the provinces in the West, the book also calls upon the central government to play the leading role, encourage mass participation and promote the opening up of the West of China.

Regionalism is a notably elusive political idea. In the paper an attempt is first made to identify various propositions that are general among contemporary European regionalists: A commitment to territorial reform of a nonfederal character, a belief that regional autonomy promotes political stability and spreads prosperity, and a notion of complementarity between European integration and internal devolution. In the second part of the paper the relevance of these propositions to Spain are considered.

In this paper, I suggest that text mining analysis of regional trade agreements (RTAs) can be a suitable methodology to develop a tangible measure of convergence between RTAs. By utilizing well-established text similarity concepts in related literatures, I attempt to investigate how much RTAs in APEC are converging in terms of how much similar RTA texts are. Furthermore, which areas of RTA converge more or less will be examined. The main results of the study are as follows. The RTAs signed by APEC members are gradually converging over time, and they converged (in terms of 5-gram Jaccard similarity) at an annual average of 8% for all RTAs (both inter- and intra-regional) while 9.7% for intra-regional RTAs only. The areas that converged the most are service and transparency chapters, which show 2.2 times and 1.6 times higher level of convergence than the average, respectively. The objective and intuitive indicators of regional norm convergence are expected to provide a common understanding for setting goals and strategies for regional economic integration in the future.