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"European Union Governance" published on by Oxford University Press.

Marine spatial planning (MSP) seeks to integrate traditionally disconnected oceans activities, management arrangements, and practices through a rational and comprehensive governance system. This article explores the emerging critical literature on MSP, focusing on key elements of MSP engaged by scholars: (1) planning discourse and narrative; (2) ocean economies and equity; (3) online ocean data and new digital ontologies; and (4) new and broad networks of ocean actors. The implications of these elements are then illustrated through a discussion of MSP in the United States. Critical scholars are beginning to go beyond applied or operational critiques of MSP projects to engage the underlying assumptions, practices, and relationships involved in planning. Interrogating MSP with interdisciplinary ideas drawn from critical social science disciplines, such as emerging applications of relational theory at sea, can provide insights into how MSP and other megaprojects both close and open new opportunities for social and environmental well-being.

AbstractAn increasingly important challenge in global governance, which in some issue areas has been labelled 'traceability', has been to track the cross‐border travels of objects that are associated with positive or negative effects. However, the common properties and identifiable patterns of variation of traceability across issue areas or industries have been insufficiently explored. We identify key properties of traceability systems, including the variation and interactions between the physical properties of the traced object, the positive or negative effects with which it is associated, the monitoring technology, and the institutionalized power relations that activate and constrain traceability systems. We examine and compare traceability systems for food safety, conflict minerals, pharmaceuticals, carbon emissions, money laundering and financial transactions. Understanding traceability in this way is important not only for these cases, but also for understanding interactions between objects, infrastructures, as well as monitoring and political mechanisms in global governance more generally.

This thesis is composed of three chapters. In the first chapter, I analyze the effect of change in product market competition on board composition and evaluate its consequences on firm performance. Using industry-specific exogenous changes in product market competition, I test whether firms respond to changes in the demand for board independence. I find that firms decrease their level of board independence by 5.52 percentage points in response to an increase in product market competition. Moreover, by exploiting the 2003 NYSE and NASDAQ rulings in a triple-difference design, I show that constraint on firm's ability to adjust its board structure in response to changes in competition has negative consequences on its performance; firms which are constrained by the regulation to reduce their board independence experience a 10.5 percentage points lower return on assets (ROA) compared to unconstrained firms. This suggests that the decrease in board independence is in the interest of shareholders. By showing that regulation may actually harm some firms, the analysis sheds light on the costs of "one size fits all" governance regulations. In the second chapter, I shed light on the political ideology of the CEO as an important determinant of firm performance. Using individual campaign contribution data, I measure the political ideology of U.S. CEOs over the period 1994 to 2014 and analyze the relation between CEO ideology and firm performance. To identify the causal effect of CEO ideology, I use a combination of time-varying effects and novel instruments based on the ideology of the pool of potential CEO hires. Across all specifications, I find that firms with Republican CEOs, on average, 6 percentage point higher ROA compared to firms with Democrat CEOs. Several alternate explanations such as time varying differences at state-industry level, political connections and firm fixed effects do not explain away the results. In the third chapter, joint work with Antonio Vazquez Lopez (UC3M), we test whether focal firms whose CEOs sit on multiple boards can suffer decreases in performance due to transient attention-grabbing events in firms where CEOs sit as independent directors. We exploit extreme returns (positive and negative), extreme earnings and extreme volatility in firms where CEOs sit as independent directors and find that such distraction leads to an average decrease of approximately 1% of focal firm's ROA, Q, market returns and ROE. This effect is stronger for focal firms that are geographically more distant to firms where CEOs sit as independent directors, which suggests that distraction is costlier in such situations. Additionally, we show that distraction is greater for CEOs that sit on the audit committee or chair a major sub-committee. Finally, we show that these distraction events also lead to lower CEO compensation and higher probability of forced turnover. ; Programa de Doctorado en Empresa y Finanzas / Business and Finance por la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid ; Presidente: Andrés Almazán; Secretario: Pedro Gete; Vocal: Miguel Antón

Spain is lagging behind in the transition to a sustainable energy system compared to other EU member states. Its unique position as an energy island, coupled with errors in energy planning inherited from previous government regimes, constitute a legacy that makes changes in the system difficult to achieve. Current political instability adds to the difficulties, under a governance framework characterised by lack of coordination and supremacy of the central government in the decision making process, in an environment where traditional energy companies still exert lobby power. The continuous changes in the regulatory framework of the energy sector have hindered investments in low carbon sources of energy due to perceived uncertainty. Small changes in the right direction are being observed though, with a more prominent role expected from the local levels of government. But many measures still originate on requirements linked to EU commitments and more initiatives at the national level need to be seen.

Ausgehend von der These, dass in der europäischen Energiewirtschaft ein grundlegender Wandel eingetreten ist, analysiert die vorliegende Arbeit die Strukturen des Zusammenwirkens von staatlichen und nicht staatlichen Akteuren im Energierecht und bewertet diese vor dem Hintergrund des Demokratieprinzips. Das Governance-Konzept, sofern rechtlich eingefangen und hinreichend eng umgrenzt, hilft dabei, jene Strukturen abzubilden, die sich durch den »Wandel von Staatlichkeit« herausgebildet haben – und dies sowohl im Bereich der Rechtsetzung und der Exekutive als auch im Bereich der Rechtsprechung. In allen drei Gewalten wirken die unterschiedlichsten Akteure außerhalb des originären Steuerungs-, Zurechnungs- und Legitimationszusammenhangs. Auch wenn man dabei der aufgezeigten Governance-Perspektive des Bundesverfassungsgerichts folgt und die Entwicklungsoffenheit des Demokratieprinzips anerkennt, so wird doch deutlich, dass die Aufgabe des klassisch-staatlichen Steuerungsanspruchs in allen drei Gewalten zu Problemen in demokratietheoretischer Hinsicht führt. / »Governance Structures in Energy Law« -- The thesis analyses the structures of interrelation between public and private actors in European Energy Law and evaluates their democratic impact. Even if one accepts the described governance perspective in the jurisdiction of Germany's Federal Constitutional Court and the openness to the development of democratic principles, the decreasing influence of public actors in Energy Law leads to legal problems – in all three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judiciary).

What is at stake for how the Internet continues to evolve is the preservation of its integrity as a single network. In practice, its governance is neither centralised nor unitary; it is piecemeal and fragmented, with authoritative decision-making coming from different sources simultaneously: governments, businesses, international organisations, technical and academic experts, and civil society. Historically, the conditions for their interaction were rarely defined beyond basic technical coordination, due at first to the academic freedom granted to the researchers developing the network and, later on, to the sheer impossibility of controlling mushrooming Internet initiatives. Today, the search for global norms and rules for the Internet continues, be it for cybersecurity or artificial intelligence, amid processes fostering the supremacy of national approaches or the vitality of a pluralist environment with various stakeholders represented. This book provides an incisive analysis of the emergence and evolution of global Internet governance, unpacking the complexity of more than 300 governance arrangements, influential debates and political negotiations over four decades. Highly accessible, this book breaks new ground through a wide empirical exploration and a new conceptual approach to governance enactment in global issue domains. A tripartite framework is employed for revealing power dynamics, relying on: a) an extensive database of mechanisms of governance for the Internet at the global and regional level; b) an in-depth analysis of the evolution of actors and priorities over time; and c) a key set of dominant practices observed in the Internet governance communities. It explains continuity and change in Internet-related negotiations, opening up new directions for thinking and acting in this field.