Suchergebnisse

Due to the demographic change in age, societies, firms, and individuals struggle with the need to postpone retirement while keeping up motivation, performance, and health throughout employees' working life. Organizations, and specifically the Human Resource Management (HRM) practices they design and implement, take a central role in this process. Being influenced by macro-level trends such as new legislation, organizational HRM practices affect outcomes such as productivity and employability both at the firm and individual level of analysis. This editorial introduces the Special Issue on "Age-related Human Resource Management Policies and Practices" by conducting an interdisciplinary literature review. We offer an organizing framework that spans the macro-, meso-, and individual level and discusses major antecedents, boundary conditions, and outcomes of age-related HRM practices. Further, we propose a typology of HRM practices and discuss the role of individual HRM dimensions versus bundles of HRM practices in dealing with an aging and more age-diverse workforce. Building on these considerations, we introduce the eight articles included in this special issue. Finally, taking stock of our review and the new studies presented here, we deduct some recommendations for future research in the field of age-related HRM.

Transnational climate change initiatives have increased in number and relevance within the global climate change regime. Despite being largely welcomed, there are concerns about their ability to deliver ambitious climate action and about their democratic legitimacy. This paper disentangles the nature of both authority and legitimacy of a specific form of transnational networks, transgovernmental networks of subnational governments. It then investigates how a major transgovernmental initiative focusing on tropical forests, the Governors' Climate and Forests Task Force, attempts to command authority and to build and maintain its legitimacy. The paper illustrates the particular challenges faced by initiatives formed primarily by jurisdictions from the Global South. Three major trade-offs related to authority and legitimacy dimensions are identified: first, the difficulty of balancing the need for increased representation with performance on ambitious climate goals; second, the need to deliver effectiveness while ensuring transparency of governance processes; and third, the limited ability to leverage formal authority of members to deliver climate action in local jurisdictions, while depending on external funds from the Global North.

At their core, the UN Climate Change conferences known as "COPs" are the primary international venue for negotiating how countries should act and cooperate to avoid dangerous climate change. The 2015 Paris Agreement is its most recent notable success. Although the climate negotiations are a state government-led process, the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) community has increasingly recognized the need for dialogue and engagement with non-governmental stakeholders in acknowledgement of the critical role they will play in mobilizing and implementing climate change solutions. Non-governmental stakeholders include science, civil society, the private sector, and local communities. Such non-governmental stakeholders also attend the COP in large numbers, where they aspire to influence the negotiations, make their voices heard, and generally contribute to advancing climate action. Indeed, the COP has tremendous convening power, annually bringing together tens of thousands of people working on diverse aspects of climate policy, science, and advocacy in one place at the same time. Despite this enormous collective potential, a communication culture has developed that relies heavily on conventional presentation and panel formats that are not conducive to mutual engagement and learning. We therefore see a need to reinvigorate the COPs through new formats of dialogue that can better foster collaboration and co-creation of climate change solutions. Against this backdrop we make the following three recommendations to foster reflection, dialogue, and collaboration among diverse actors at the UN Climate Change conferences, focusing on the interactions that take place outside the formal negotiations. These recommendations are intended to be actionable by different types of meeting hosts at the COP, including observers, Party delegates, the UNFCCC Secretariat and the COP presidency.

The Earth System Science Partnership, which unites all major global change research programmes, declared in 2001 an urgent need to develop "strategies for Earth System management". Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable such strategies would be, remains unspecified. It is apparent that the institutions, organizations and mechanisms by which humans currently govern their relationship with the natural environment and global biochemical systems are not only insufficient-they are also poorly understood. This article presents the science programme of the Earth System Governance Project, a new 10-year global research effort endorsed by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). It outlines the concept of earth system governance as a challenge for the social sciences, and it elaborates on the interlinked analytical problems and research questions of earth system governance as an object of study. These analytical problems concern the overall architecture of earth system governance, agency beyond the state and of the state, the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes as well as their accountability and legitimacy, and modes of allocation and access in earth system governance. The article also outlines four crosscutting research themes that are crucial for the study of each analytical problem as well as for the integrated understanding of earth system governance: the role of power, knowledge, norms and scale. © The Author(s) 2010.

An analysis of the regulations of herbicide use for weed control in non-agricultural ⁄ urban amenity areas, including actual pesticide use, was carried out as a joint survey of seven European countries: Denmark, Finland, Germany, Latvia, the Netherlands, Sweden and United Kingdom. Herbicides constitute the major part of the pesticides used in urban amenity areas. Herbicide use on hard surfaces is the largest in terms of volume and potential contamination of surface and groundwater. The aim of the study was to investigate the differences in political interest and public debate on the use of pesticides in public urban amenity areas, regulations within each country at national, regional and local levels, possible use of alternative weed control methods and the amounts of pesticides used on urban amenity areas. A comparative analysis revealed major differences in political interest, regulations and availability of statistics on pesticide use. Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands and Germany have, or have had, a strong public and political interest for reducing the use of herbicides to control weeds in urban amenity areas and also have very strict regulations. The UK is currently undergoing a period of increasing awareness and strengthening regulation, while Latvia and Finland do not have specific regulations for weed control in urban amenity areas or on hard surfaces. Statistics on pesticide ⁄ herbicide use on urban amenity areas were only available in Denmark and the Netherlands. Developing this kind of information base reveals the differences in herbicide use, regulations and policies in European countries and may enhance the transfer of knowledge on sustainable weed control across countries.

Overcoming childhood cancers is critically dependent on the state of research. Understanding how, with whom and what the research community is doing with childhood cancers is essential for ensuring the evidence-based policies at national and European level to support children, their families and researchers. As part of the European Union funded EUROCANCERCOMS project to study and integrate cancer communications across Europe, we have carried out new research into the state of research in childhood cancers. We are very grateful for all the support we have received from colleagues in the European paediatric oncology community, and in particular from Edel Fitzgerald and Samira Essiaf from the SIOP Europe office. This report and the evidence-based policies that arise from it come at a important junction for Europe and its Member States. They provide a timely reminder that research into childhood cancers is critical and needs sustainable long-term support.