Suchergebnisse

The Arctic is emerging today as an international region whose importance in political, economic, and environmental terms rivals that of the world's other major regions. What remains in doubt, at this juncture, is how the Arctic states -not to mention others — will respond to this development in policy terms. Are these states likely to upgrade their capacity to handle Arctic issues by adding substantial Arctic expertise to their policy planning staffs; creating bureaux of Arctic or northern affairs in their foreign ministries; establishing effective interagency coordinating mechanisms to handle complex Arctic issues, or devising new Arctic policies to replace the policies of benign neglect they have long relied on in dealing with Arctic matters ? These are serious concerns whose resolution will take time and may differ from state to state. Just as the recognition of the Arctic as a distinctive international region has been a major development of the 1980s, the formulation of appropriate public responses to this development seems likely to become a central Arctic concern of the 1990s.

The Oslo-Potsdam approach to regime effectiveness has much to recommend it, especially in conceptual terms. It yields effectiveness scores for individual regimes that range from 0 to 1 and that facilitate comparative analysis. Yet the revised version of the approach set forth in Hovi et al. (2003, this volume) fails to solve the fundamental problems evident in earlier versions regarding the no-regime outcome (NR) and the collective optimum (CO). Nor does this version address the relative merits of the Oslo-Potsdam solution and other approaches to regime consequences that do not rely on direct measurements of regime effectiveness as the dependent variable. As a result, the argument that some measure of effectiveness—however faulty—is better than none is not persuasive. Even so, the debate over the Oslo-Potsdam solution has proven fruitful. Our understanding of the issues involved in evaluating regime consequences has surely grown as a product of this debate.

The Oslo-Potsdam approach to regime effectiveness has much to recommend it, especially in conceptual terms. It yields effectiveness scores for individual regimes that range from 0 to 1 & that facilitate comparative analysis. Yet the revised version of the approach set forth in Hovi et al (2003, this volume) fails to solve the fundamental problems evident in earlier versions regarding the no-regime outcome (NR) & the collective optimum (CO). Nor does this version address the relative merits of the Oslo-Potsdam solution & other approaches to regime consequences that do not rely on direct measurements of regime effectiveness as the dependent variable. As a result, the argument that some measure of effectiveness -- however faulty -- is better than none is not persuasive. Even so, the debate over the Oslo-Potsdam solution has proven fruitful. Our understanding of the issues involved in evaluating regime consequences has surely grown as a product of this debate. 9 References. Adapted from the source document.

Eulogizes Virginia Walsh, a political scientist, who at the time of her death was an assistant professor at Rutgers U in Newark, NJ, & Executive Officer of the Institutional Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, a large-scale international research project. Throughout her academic career she focused on matters of global environmental change, with a particular interest in marine systems. She was especially fascinated by the connections between institutions & knowledge & actively contributed to discussions on the social construction of institutions.