Suchergebnisse

The UNESCO social science research program, Management of Social Transformations (MOST), scheduled for inauguration in Jan 1994, should provide a research base for national & subnational policy making from a global perspective. An approach balanced between developed & developing countries is planned on the themes of: management of change in multicultural & multiethnic societies; cites as areas of accelerated social transformation; & local & regional adjustment to economic, technical, & environmental transformations. MOST will contribute to building up institutional & scientific capacity & data infrastructure in developing countries. Projects will be identified through coordination between applicants, as well as through the two central bodies of MOST -- the Intergovernmental Council & the Scientific Steering Committee of UNESCO. M. Pflum

Abstract
Risk governance, sustainability and safety-by-design have high attention in current research projects and policy. In the EU H2020 Gov4Nano project, we refined the EU H2020 caLIBRAte phase-gate nano-risk innovation governance framework, its guidance and expanded the list of supporting risk governance tools. Stakeholder wishes were mapped from previous projects and consultations made within Gov4Nano and across the two other EU H2020 NMBP-13 governance projects (NANORIGO and RiskGone) and considered in the refinement. The revised framework considers three pre-defined phase-gate models for minor (fast-track/low risk), intermediate (medium risk) and novel (high-risk) developments. The guidance was further elaborated to direct users though sustainability and safety-by-design considerations and risk mitigation actions. ISO21505 was used as the backbone for the risk governance framework. The approach allows design of the specific nano-risk governance project and information requirements for decision-making. The list of recommended nano-risk governance tools was expanded and selected considering their reliability and performance. An important step in this process was an evaluation of tools made under the umbrella of the OECD (ENV/CBC/MONO(2021)23; ENV/CBC/MONO(2021)27/REV; ENV/CBC/MONO(2021)28; ENV/CBC/MONO(2021)29/REV) and development of a new tool assessment framework called TRAAC (Transparency, Reliability, Accessibility, Applicability and Reliability). Limitations in application domains remains an issue for future developments. The approach and tools are made accessible via a nano-risk governance portal produced by the three NMBP-13 projects (http://nanoriskgov.eu/).
Funding: European Union's Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement 814401.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the current phase of globalization is the increased importance of foreign direct investment (FDI). This is not only true at the global level but also at the regional level. It is clear that the process of economic integration in the European Union has boosted FDI for the EU countries. In the field of international economics, the modeling of FDI has been high on the research agenda in recent years and clear progress has been made in understanding the determinants and effects of FDI (see for instance Barba-Navaretti and Venables (2004) for an overview). The new theoretical insights are, however, not always in line with the facts. One important puzzle in this respect is precisely the fact that economic integration or, in modeling terms, a fall in trade costs has been accompanied by an increase in FDI. From the data we know that so-called horizontal FDI, that is FDI undertaken for market size considerations, is the dominant form of FDI, but theory tells us that a fall in trade costs should go along with a decrease in horizontal FDI. Lower trade costs, ceteris paribus, make it more profitable for firms to serve foreign markets via exports instead of setting up their own production in these markets.

Before the rise of DNA sequence analysis or the controversies over the Human Genome Diversity Project, there was the International Biological Program, which ran from 1964 to 1974. The Human Adaptability arm of the International Biological Program featured a complex encounter between human geneticists and biological anthropologists. These scientists were especially interested in what could be learned from the bodies of people they referred to as both primitive and in danger of going extinct. In this article, I address how new access to technologies of cold storage, which would allow blood to be transported from the field to the lab and be stored for subsequent reanalysis, gave shape to this episode in Cold War human biology and has ramified into our genomic age. This case study highlights the importance of cryopreservation to projects of genetic salvage as well as to the life sciences, more generally. I argue that 'latency', a technical term initially used by cryobiologists to describe life in a state of suspended animation, can be extended as a concept for science studies scholars interested in technoscientific efforts to manage the future.