Suchergebnisse

The literature on decentralization points out that there is a tendency to limit discretion at the local level by, for example, imposing national standards. It is therefore of interest to understand how sub-national authorities act under conditions of political decentralization, which is not followed by a similar delegation of administrative competence. Are sub- national authorities able to make policy changes or do they simply follow the same path as the central state authorities prior to decentralization? Drawing on insights from organisational perspectives, it might be expected that the shift of organisational locus affects policy change. Based on qualitative data, we explore the Norwegian Reform of Government Administration, which transferred the bulk of the national road network to the regional level in 2010. This was a political decentralization reform. The sub-national authorities continued to rely on the national road agency's competence. Although standards, the professional community in the road agency and limited financial resources hampered the effect of the reform, we find that the regional authorities were able to influence the focus of the road agency towards a more sustainable and holistic regional perspective.

Abstract
This article examines if Australia's policy and law regarding asylum seeker and refugee children in Nauru are consistent with its international legal obligations under the terms of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Under article 3 of the CRC, Australia is required to consider the best interests of each child within its jurisdiction. It is also bound by the CRC prohibition on arbitrary detention and obligations derived from Convention rights relating to health, education, and family matters. To assess Australia's law and policy, the article draws on the findings of recent inquiries and reports that examine how detention and conditions at the processing centre and in the community in Nauru have impacted on the mental and physical well-being of children. The article highlights gaps in the implementation of Convention rights and draws together the findings and recommendations made in recent reports to assist in the development of suitable solutions. It concludes that Australia's treatment of asylum seeker and refugee children violates key obligations under the CRC and that, accordingly, Australia should remove these children from Nauru and settle them in Australia.

This article critically evaluates the housing policies and legal provisions regarding property rights for women in India. It interrogates the inclusion of gender within the policies, programmes and laws, and exposes its biases and skewed priorities. Through a desk review of the policies and programmes and an examination of court judgements, it provides an understanding of the contestations and challenges that exist therein. With carefully conducted interviews and focussed group discussions with women beneficiaries and policy implementers, this article strives to enrich the analysis. It provides a set of suggestions and recommendations on enhancing awareness on women's right to property and providing women greater access to housing rights. Although the fieldwork has been conducted in Delhi–NCR region, it has implications for the country as a whole. Overall this article contextualises the debates on gender, policy, laws and institutions in a broader framework of material structure s and a patriarchal society. It highlights the significance of creating awareness on gender issues for all concerned, including policymakers, implementers, judiciary and the women beneficiaries themselves.

Agricultural development research and policy has to address climate change. Against the mainstream focus on adaptation, this article reports on public policy implications for climate change mitigation of a project measuring environmental, social and economic aspects of India's rice economy: greenhouse gases (GHGs), energy and water; the quantity and quality of work and a systematic analysis of market and social costs and returns. A detailed life cycle assessment of GHG production generates four different kinds of technological possibilities helping the transition towards lower-carbon agriculture: rain-fed rice production (RR), System of Rice Intensification (SRI), solar pumps (SPs) and halving transmission and distribution (T&D) losses in the electricity grid. Through quantitative ranking and qualitative discursive analysis, a new method, multi-criteria mapping (MCM), is trialled in which the benefits of alternatives are evaluated by incommensurable criteria. These are costs, employment and GHGs. This experimental application crosses two languages (English and Tamil), compares participants with expert knowledge (EKs) with agrarian participants with situated knowledge (SKs), and explores the influence of identity (urban-rural, gender, and education).

AbstractBenefit–cost analysis is widely used to evaluate alternative courses of action that are designed to achieve policy objectives. Although many analyses take uncertainty into account, they typically only consider uncertainty about cost estimates and physical states of the world, whereas uncertainty about individual preferences, thus the benefit of policy intervention, is ignored. Here, we propose a strategy to integrate individual uncertainty about preferences into benefit–cost analysis using societal preference intervals, which are ranges of values over which it is unclear whether society as a whole should accept or reject an option. To illustrate the method, we use preferences for implementing a smart grid technology to sustain critical electricity demand during a 24‐hour regional power blackout on a hot summer weekend. Preferences were elicited from a convenience sample of residents in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. This illustrative example shows that uncertainty in individual preferences, when aggregated to form societal preference intervals, can substantially change society's decision. We conclude with a discussion of where preference uncertainty comes from, how it might be reduced, and why incorporating unresolved preference uncertainty into benefit–cost analyses can be important.

Abstract
In this article, we look firstly at trends in arrivals of spontaneous refugees and resettled refugees in Ireland and the integration supports available to this group as outlined in national-level policy. We discuss the similarities between spontaneous and resettled refugee groups in Ireland and argue that integration needs in the longer term are similar; both groups of refugees require integration supports tailored to their specific needs. We discuss these needs in this article. We suggest that the current approach to provide only targeted supports to resettled refugees is somewhat paradoxical, in that one group of beneficiaries appears privileged in the provision of integration services and supports over the other group, despite similar needs. This article comes at a time when Ireland has opted-in to the European Union Recast Reception Conditions Directive, which provides asylum seekers the right to work under certain conditions. The article explores the impact of recent policy and legislative reforms on the integration prospects of spontaneous refugees in particular. It also looks to the future and discusses challenges under the current system and the increasing asylum application processing backlog.

AbstractThe number of grandmothers who provide regular care for their grandchildren and do housework for their daughters or daughters-in-law is increasing in Turkey. While perpetuating traditional gender roles for themselves as a surrogate daughter, wife, or daughter-in-law, these women nonetheless enable younger women to distance themselves from obligatory care work at home. The sociocultural concepts of kinship ties, economic need, or love for grandchildren do not fully explain why grandmothers assume the role of caregiver for their grandchildren. Drawing on interviews with 25 grandmothers from middle-class families in urban Turkey, this article shows, first, that these women's gendered subjectivity is formed by both habitual and intentional actions that defying the oppression and resistance duality within patriarchal Turkish society. Second, in dialogue with the scholarship on the "classic patriarchal bargain"1and feminist analyses of neoliberal social policy, the article suggests that these grandmothers' inarticulate desire to live in solidarity with the younger generation of women may be turned into a government instrument in the context of Turkey's increasingly family-centered neoliberal social policy environment.

AbstractThe global infrastructure sector is thriving. But community opposition to major projects is also rising. Australian examples demonstrate the policy backflips, reputational pitfalls, and financial costs of project delays and cancellations. Failures to engage communities are surprising, given the widespread adoption of community engagement (CE) principles and the increasing professionalization of CE roles. If acceptance of the need for CE in infrastructure is more widespread than ever, why are we not seeing smoother project delivery, reduced protest, and cost savings? This paradox is the driving force behind the Next Generation Engagement project. This article offers a practitioners' perspective to introduce the project and present key findings from its 12‐month pilot study aiming to establish a transdisciplinary, industry‐led research agenda for CE in Australia's infrastructure sector. The article contributes to our understanding of CE literature and research codesign. It maps out the top five priority themes for future research to support infrastructure selection, planning and delivery. The research agenda provides guidance for policy, and practice, offering consolidated, research‐based insights for policymakers and practitioners.

AbstractConcerns over disinformation have intensified in recent years. Policymakers, pundits, and observers worry that countries like Russia are spreading false narratives and disseminating rumours in order to shape international opinion and, by extension, government policies to their liking. Despite the importance of this topic, mainstream theories in International Relations offer contradictory guidance on how to think about disinformation. I argue that disinformation is ineffective in terms of changing the policies of a target as regards to its foreign policy alignments and armaments – that is, the balance of power. To be strategically effective, disinformation must somehow overcome three powerful obstacles: first, the fundamental uncertainty that international anarchy generates over any information broadcasted by adversaries; second, the pre-existing prejudices of foreign policy elites and ordinary citizens; and third, the countermeasures that are available even amid political polarisation. I examine the most likely case of there seemingly being a conscious and effective strategy that emphasises disinformation: the Russian campaign that has targeted the Baltic states, especially since the 2014 annexation of Crimea. The available evidence strongly suggests that the strategic effects of disinformation are exaggerated.

This article outlines a research agenda to study how, why, and with what consequences systems of migration policy that rely on time-delimited statuses have been tools of nation-state making. Taking a long view and comparing key contemporary cases, I argue that temporary migration regimes have been appealing because they purport to reconcile the disparate interests and preferences of political actors in sending and receiving countries, native and foreign workers, and employers. Such regimes have been a means for the affirmative selection of migrants as workers—an approach that preserves the option of rejecting them as permanent members. The proposed research would uncover the full range of temporal means by which states have shaped populations through migration policy. Substantively, it explores how changes in the ratio of temporary to permanent statuses affect the meaning of political belonging. This would include an examination of how the policing of temporariness requires routine bureaucratic monitoring as well as extreme measures like deportation with consequences for migrants as well as for the communities in which they live.

The article analyzes key documents of the European Union (EU) related with its external policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as its practical implications. The Maastricht Treaty created bases for the common external policy of the European Union. The EU strategy towards Latin America is reflected in the Multiannual Indicative Regional Programme 2014-2020. The document states the progress achieved, continuing challenges, priority areas and amount of the financial aid.Currently the joint summits between the European Union and the Community of Latin American and the Caribbean States (EU–CALAC) serve as a main dialogue field enabling cooperation between the two regions. The main areas of collaboration are: democracy and human rights, security, trade and investment, innovations and education, climate change. Apart the EU provides a significant financial support to Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) through sector programmes aimed at social and economic transformations in LAC. In order to encourage investment the parties established Latin American Investment Facility (LAIF). The European Union and the Caribbean Foundation (EU–LAC Fundation) serves as an additional tool to promote and strengthen strategic cooperation between the two regions.

Conflict, peace and security are some of the enduring concerns of the Peace Research Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. They have become integrated in the dominant disciplines of international relations and political science and now are also part of most of the social science disciplines, such as economics, sociology, public policy, gender studies, international law and so on. This article purportedly seeks to examine some of the varied issues of conflict, peace and security and the challenges posed before the IR theorists to deal with them. It will also examine how the liberals, realists, Marxists, neo-Marxists and functionalists interpret conflict-transformation, peace-building and security. This article concludes with the argument that it is within the frontiers of critical theory as well as a class analysis of the structure of society within any state that social scientists can move from a paradigm of conflict reduction towards a more egalitarian model of peace and security. This article also concludes that only human security with a strong social welfare policy will lead to an egalitarian social order, especially in India.

The article is devoted to the relations of two distinguished statesmen of the Vienna System period – Austrian Chancellor Metternich and Russian Chancellor Nesselrode. They took the helm of the foreign affairs of the allied states for a long period of time – their cooperation lasted almost 40 years. Russian-Austrian union was based on concurrence in their political views regarding the Concert of Europe, adherence to the principles of legitimacy, conservatism and hostility to revolution and remained until the Crimean War. According to estimates of historians, Nesselrode was just an obedient apprentice of the Austrian Chancellor who orchestrated the whole European policy. Adherence to the principles of conservatism and The Holy Alliance resulted in nothing but misfortunes of Russian foreign policy and its submission to the «European Idea». Austria benefited from this and therefore Nesselrode was called «Russian foreign minister in the service of Austria». However documents witness that Nesselrode being an adept of Metternich's doctrine wasn't just a blindfolded follower of all Austrian initiatives. He could stand his ground in face of difficult European politics. In his way he faithfully served Russia and Nicolas the I.

AbstractWe study an (R, s, S) inventory control policy with stochastic demand, lost sales, zero lead‐time and a target service level to be satisfied. The system is modeled as a discrete time Markov chain for which we present a novel approach to derive exact closed‐form solutions for the limiting distribution of the on‐hand inventory level at the end of a review period, given the reorder level (s) and order‐up‐to level (S). We then establish a relationship between the limiting distributions for adjacent values of the reorder point that is used in an efficient recursive algorithm to determine the optimal parameter values of the (R, s, S) replenishment policy. The algorithm is easy to implement and entails less effort than solving the steady‐state equations for the corresponding Markov model. Point‐of‐use hospital inventory systems share the essential characteristics of the inventory system we model, and a case study using real data from such a system shows that with our approach, optimal policies with significant savings in inventory management effort are easily obtained for a large family of items.

The study examined the effect of commercial bank sectorial credit to the manufacturing and agricultural sub-sectors on economic growth in Nigeria with time series data from 1981 to 2015, using co-integration and error correction mechanism for the empirical work. A three equation model was specified to analyze this study, and the variables include; real GDP, bank sectorial credit to manufacturing and agriculture subsectors, monetary policy rate, financial market development, sourced from CBN statistical bulletin and also the interaction variables. The variables were tested for unit root using the Augmented Dickey Fuller approach and were found to be stationary. The empirical result revealed that commercial bank credit to the manufacturing and agricultural subsectors significantly affects economic growth in Nigeria both in the short run and in the long run. Furthermore, development of the financial sector enhances the growth effects of commercial banks credit to the manufacturing and agricultural subsectors of the economy. It was therefore recommended that the Nigerian apex financial authorities should encourage banks via deliberate policy to increase credits to these subsectors of the economy.