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"This collection of essays examines the development and application of environmental laws and the relationship between public laws and international law. Notions of good governance, transparency and fairness in decision-making are analysed within the area of the law perceived as having the greatest potential to address today's global environmental concerns. International trends, such as free trade and environmental markets, are also observed to be infiltrating national laws. Together, the essays illustrate the idea that in the context of environmental problems being dynamic and environmental changes appearing suddenly, laws become difficult to design and effect. Typically, they are also devised within a conflicted setting. It is in this changeable and discordant context that environmental discourses such as precaution, justice, risk, equity, security, citizenship and markets contribute to legal responses, present legal opportunities or hinder progress"--

The article proposes that in order to better understand current approaches to international state building, it is essential to revisit the central concepts on which they are grounded. It proposes that disaggregating state building & looking anew at its various components reveals not only its immense scope but also the need to question current practices. State building is in essence about the development of institutions that manage state society relationships. Institutions are more than formal rules: equally important are their informal norms & how both are being enforced in practice. This bears on the transferability of institutions. The article suggests that emphasis should be more on the processes of institutional development than on the imposition of prepackaged "solutions." However slow & inefficient domestic decision making processes may be, they are indispensable to create sustainable change. 55 References. Adapted from the source document.

A 52-nation survey on the international use of incarceration shows a broad variation in the degree to which countries make use of imprisonment. The survey shows that Russia and the United States now lead all other nations, with an incarceration rate that is 5-8 times that of most industrialized nations. Although rates of violent crime in the United States are considerable higher than in other nations, this has not been the primary factor leading to the 155% increase in new court commitments since 1980 because 84% of the increase was due to drug, property, and public order offenses. Cross-national comparisons of incarceration have found that sentence length is a key variable in explaining differences in the use of incarceration and that relative punitiveness may be a function of the degree of general societal inequality.