Suchergebnisse

Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Figures -- Chapter 1 Global Water Governance: An Overview -- Abstract -- From Management to Governance -- Governance: Both Global and Good? -- References -- Chapter 2 Environments -- Abstract -- Water's Environmental Importance -- The Western Roots of Global Water Governance -- Linking "Environment" to Global Water Governance -- The Mekong River -- Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 3 Economies -- Abstract -- Cost-Benefit Analysis -- Development Economics and Water Markets -- Common-Pool Resources: Beyond States Versus Markets -- Ecosystem Services -- The Water-Energy-Food-Climate Nexus -- Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 4 Societies -- Abstract -- Water Scarcity -- Water Risk and Security -- Procedural Norms, Transparency, and Participation -- Water Ethics and Water Rights -- Conclusion: Water Justice -- Conclusion -- References -- Chapter 5 Water Futures -- Abstract -- Transition or Transformation? The Twenty-First-Century Challenge -- The Ends of Global Water Governance -- References -- Index

"This book presents a historically situated explanation of the rise of global water governance and the contemporary challenges that global water governance seeks to address. It is particularly concerned with connecting what are often technical issues in water management with the social and political structures that affect how technical and scientific advice affects decisions. Schmidt and Matthews are careful to avoid the pitfalls of setting up opposing binaries, such as 'nature versus culture' or 'private versus public', thereby allowing readers to understand how contests over water governance have been shaped over time and why they will continue to be so. Co-written by an academic and a practitioner, Global Challenges in Water Governance combines the dual concerns for both analytical clarity and practical applicability in a way that is particularly valuable both for educators, researchers, decision-makers, and newcomers to the complexities of water use decisions."--Provided by publisher.

In this article, we use data collected from Wisconsin superintendents to determine the extent to which the curtailing of collective bargaining facilitated local public management reform adoption. The results show the near elimination of collective bargaining did spur substantial reform adoption in areas of performance pay and recruitment, and that longer serving superintendents and those with partisan ideologies were more likely to adopt management reforms. However, the results also indicate that curtailing collective bargaining appeared to hurt employee morale and made it more difficult to recruit and retain quality teachers. The results contribute to the public human resource literature by providing a real life case study of how public management practices change when collective bargaining is eliminated.

This book presents a new era where the main force for social change, research, education, economic betterment, and even employee happiness is the global enterprise. So many businesses today are "global," though often with conflicting priorities and potential civilization clashes. Companies may operate in a practically borderless world, seeking ideas and talents globally, but without proper knowledge and preparation, it is one endless struggle. Inside, you'll learn many global business-related issues ranging from historical matters to the realities of the 21st century-from local cultures to global organizations and from political, legal, and economic topics to accounting, finance, marketing, and management perspectives. This book directs your attention to critical business challenges in addition to the need of corporate governance at all levels. These issues include how it all relates to the environment and the structure of the corporation. Whether you're already out in the CEO world, or a student in upper-level undergraduate or graduate study, or executive education, this book gives you numerous combinations of how-to-do projects with philosophical perspectives of a new and challenging era

The achievements of China's urbanization should not be evaluated solely in terms of adequate infrastructures, but also in their ability to implement sound governance practices to ensure social, environmental and economic development. This book addresses several key challenges faced by Chinese cities, based on the most recent policies and experiments adopted by central and local governments. The contributors offer an interdisciplinary analysis of the urbanization process in China, and examine the following key topics: the institutional foundations of Chinese cities, the legal status of the lan

We examine how governance environment affects business activities across countries. Using an updated framework of governance environments, we classify countries into three groups based on their dominant modes of governance: (1) rule-based (strong rule of law), (2) relation-based (weak rule of law and strong informal network based on private relations), and (3) neither-based (absence of both public rules and private network). We then examine how different governance types affect trade patterns and foreign investment flows. Chapter 2 theoretically proposes that the governance environment of a society plays a significant role in influencing international trade and foreign investment across countries. Chapter 3 examines how different governance types affect trade patterns among 44 countries. Overall, we find that rule-based countries trade more than relation-based or neither-based countries. A large positive effect on trade flows exists between two highly rule-based countries and between two relation-based countries. Any trade relationship involving a neither-based country negatively affects trade flows, even between two neither-based countries. In Chapter 4, we examine how different governance types affect foreign investment flows among 44 countries. We find that rule-based countries attract the lowest amount of EDI relative to total amount of foreign investment, and they have the largest stock market size relative to their economies. This thesis is among the first to introduce the third category of governance—neither-based governance. This advancement will contribute to both the institution and political economy literature. Using the updated framework of governance to explore trade and foreign investment patterns of many countries, especially of those relatively undeveloped countries, will contribute the international business literature. In addition to academic contributions, this study provides important policy implications to those neither-based countries. We suggest that in considering trade and foreign investment policies, governments should pay close attention to the governance environments to evaluate their own and their partners' situations when conducting international business such as trade and foreign investment.

Putting forward an innovative way of looking at planning problems and policies, this volume suggests actor-consulting is important in addressing the fuzzy nature of planning. Including contributions from Patsy Healy, Johan Woltjer, Don Miller and Karel Martens, the volume presents a variety of case studies which demonstrate the use of the actor-consulting model in addressing planning issues.

In der Wissenschaft konnte schon mehrmals konzeptionell und empirisch nachgewiesen warden, dass Corporate Governance einen Einfluss auf Unternehmensfinanzierung oder auch die Entwicklung von Finanzmärkten hat. Demnach wurde des öfteren vorgeschlagen Corporate Governance in einem Land oder einer Firma zu verbessern um nicht nur die Entwicklung von Aktienmärkten zu fördern, sondern auch die allgemeine ökonomische Entwicklung. Dieser Gedanke hat jedoch zwei wesentliche Schwächen: (i) ein unklares Verständnis über "gute" Corporate Governance und (ii) unzureichendes Wissen über die Entwicklung und Veränderung der Corporate Governance. Während die erste Frage wahrscheinlich niemals abschliessend beantwortet werden kann, unter anderem wegen unterschiedlichen Interessen der verschiedenen Stakeholder der Corporate Governance, versucht diese Studie die zweite Thematik konzeptionell und empirisch zu bearbeiten. In einem ersten Schritt wird hierfür die Corporate Governance Environmnent entwickelt, welche beschreibt wie Corporate Governance sowohl in legalen und sub-legalen Standards als auch Normen und Verhaltensweisen der Gesellschaft eingebettet ist. In einem zweiten Schritt wird ein konzeptioneller Rahmen einer sich verändernden Corporate Governance Environment geschaffen, indem relevante Theorien untersucht werden (z.B. Neue Institutionenökonomie, Institutionentheorie). Konzeptionell kann gezeigt werden, dass internationale Faktorenflüsse wie Auslandsdirektinvestitionen auf die Entwicklung der Corporate Governance einwirken. Somit wird eine umgekehrte Kausalität festgestellt, da konventionell Investitionen von der Corporate Governance beeinflusst werden. Diese konzeptionelle Erkenntnis wird im Folgenden mit einem neuartigen Datensatz kompiliert aus Quellen wie dem IMD World Competitiveness Center, der Weltbank, der PRS Gruppe, UNSTATS und EUROSTATS über den Zeitraum von 1991 bis 2005 getestet. Die Empirie untersucht mit Hilfe ökonometrischer Analysen die Auswirkungen von Auslandsdirektinvestitionen aus entwickelten Ländern auf die Evolution der Corporate Governance Environment in Entwicklungs- und Schwellenländern. Bei den Untersuchungen kann gezeigt werden, dass unter bestimmten Umständen eine Verbesserung der Corporate Governance Environment in Übereinstimmung mit der Corproate Governance Environment des Quellenlandes der Investitionen eintritt und somit das entwickelte konzeptionelle Modell in Teilen bestätigt werden kann. Die Ergebnisse der Studie erweitern einerseits die akademische Diskussion um Corporate Governance und andererseits fördern sie die politische und ökonomische Diskussion über den Einfluss von Auslandsdirektinvestitionen auf die heimischen Institutionen. Das Resultat dieser Untersuchung kann somit Entscheidungsträgern und Beratern von Institutionen sowohl in Industrieländern als auch in Entwicklungsländern, welche an ökonomischer Entwicklung arbeiten, helfen, die institutionelle Evolution und auch die Effekte der Globalisierung besser zu verstehen. ; It has often been conceptually and empirically shown that corporate governance impacts firm finance and the development of the country's financial markets. Consequently it has been suggested to improve corporate governance in order to support not only stock markets development but also economic development. This idea though has two major shortcomings: (i) an unclear definition of "good" corporate governance and (ii) insufficient knowledge of how corporate governance develops and changes. While the first question can probably never be answered due to differing interests of various stakeholders, this study aims at answering the second question conceptually and empirically. In a first step the concept of the corporate governance environment is developed, which explicates how corporate governance is embedded in legal and sublegal standards as well as in behaviors and norms of the society. In a second step a conceptual framework of a changing corporate governance environment is developed by employing new institutional economics and institutional theory. As can be shown conceptually, international factor flows including foreign investments influence the development of the corporate governance environment – the very variable corporate governance is often trying to affect, which leads to a reverse causality. This finding is tested empirically with a novel dataset compiled from the IMD World Competitiveness Center, the World Bank, PRS Group, UNSTATS and EUROSTATS including data from 1991-2005. The empirical part employs econometrical analyzes to study the influence of foreign direct investments from developed countries on the evolution of corporate governance environments in developing countries. It can be found that under certain circumstances an improvement can be registered accordingly with the source country's CGE, supporting the developed conceptual framework. The findings of this study on the one hand help the academic debate on corporate governance, and on the other they advance the economic and political discussion whether foreign investors influence various institutions relevant for doing business. Hence, the results of this research can help policy makers and advisors as well as other institutions interested in economic development – both in developing and developed economies - to better understand institutional evolution and with that the effects of globalization.

Out-migration might decrease the pressure of population on the environment, but what happens to the communities that manage the local environment when they are weakened by the absence of their members? In an era where community-based natural resource management has emerged as a key hope for sustainable development, this is a crucial question. Building on over a decade of empirical work conducted in Oaxaca, Mexico, Communities Surviving Migration identifies how out-migration can impact rural communities in strongholds of biocultural diversity. It reflects on the possibilities of community self-governance and survival in the likely future of limited additional migration and steady - but low - rural populations, and what different scenarios imply for environmental governance and biodiversity conservation. In this way, the book adds a critical cultural component to the understanding of migration-environment linkages, specifically with respect to environmental change in migrant-sending regions. Responding to the call for more detailed analyses and reporting on migration and environmental change, especially in contexts where rural communities, livelihoods and biodiversity are interconnected, this volume will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental migration, development studies, population geography, and Latin American studies.

Economic policy debate in the United States during the 1980s focused on the dynamics of bidder and target tactics in hostile takeovers. Confronted with the largest transactions in business history, financial economists took advantage of developments in econometric techniques to conduct virtually real time studies of the impact on firm value of each new bidder tactic and target defense. For courts and lawyers, hostile takeovers subjected standard features of corporate law to the equivalent of a stress x-ray, revealing previously undetected doctrinal cracks. Congress held seemingly endless hearings on the subject, although managing to enact only relatively innocuous tax penalties on particular defensive tactics the public found especially offensive. State legislatures, closer to the political action, acted more substantively, if less wisely. Whether or not takeovers created new wealth they did result in its transfer, and at least one of the parties from whom wealth was transferred – target management – had remarkable influence in state legislatures. When labor also came actively to oppose hostile takeovers, the coalition was virtually unstoppable. The decade saw some thirty-four states pass more than sixty-five major laws restricting corporate takeovers, including states discouraging partial offers and front-end loaded offers. The 1980s have now closed transactionally as well as chronologically. The first quarter of 1991 marked the lowest level of merger and acquisition activity since the first quarter of 1980. The passing of this remarkable decade invites a broader perspective, which can be helpfully thought of as the political ecology of takeovers. An ecological perspective builds on the proposition that phenomena are embedded in interactive systems – a rich web of mutually dependent relationships. Thus, a seemingly independent event cannot be fully evaluated without understanding how it relates to the environmental forces to which it was a response and which, in turn, respond to it. What the narrow focus of the 1980s debate missed was an appreciation of the complex economic corporate governance and political environments in which hostile takeovers are embedded. Corporate acquisitions are a response to real conditions in the economic environment. The choice among acquisition techniques, most importantly between friendly and hostile transactions, depends both upon the economic motivation for the transaction and upon conditions in the corporate governance environment. Finally, conditions in the corporate governance environment are directly influenced by politics; both what is allowed and prohibited is defined, in the first instance, by legislation. My goal in this article is two-fold. I begin by sketching the political ecology of takeovers in the United States – the interaction of economics, corporate governance and politics that shaped the experience of the 1980s. I then make a tentative effort at applying the insights gained from an ecological perspective to the current endeavor to change dramatically the European corporate governance environment through the harmonization of takeover and company law in the European Community. Sheltered by the cloak of political naivete commonly allowed those attempting comparative analysis from a distance, I will argue that an ecological understanding of takeovers suggests a different approach than that reflected so far in the debate over the terms of harmonization. This approach is based on what I term the "mutability principle."