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Ideally, to reduce energy insecurity, a nation needs to deploy a range of renewable energy (RE) sources. For Central Asian economies, renewable sources appear to be a rational choice; yet, the deployment of renewables is limited and varies substantially by country. Conventional statistics for RE in Central Asia confirm the expected: hydrocarbon-poor countries (Kyrgyz Republic and Tajikistan) rely on RE to a greater extent than fuel-rich economies (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). However, this picture changes drastically once a stricter definition of RE - without the contribution of large-scale hydro power plants (LSHPPs) - is incorporated. Such treatment is appropriate due to several considerations, including sustainability, as the LSHPPs are infamous for their adverse environmental impacts; and security, as the water-energy nexus leaves national energy policymaking susceptible to sometimes arduous regional consensus. The latter aspect is especially relevant in the Central Asian setting. Thus, with the strict definition of RE applied, fossil fuel-rich Central Asian countries lead in the RE segment, whereas hydrocarbon-poor economies have almost no RE facilities in place. This paper seeks to explore such possibilities in Central Asia. Section one reviews the evolution of the energy security concept. Section two examines the regional context for energy cooperation. Section three analyses the economic and energy profiles of Central Asian economies. Section four investigates nations' RE policies and explores the RE potential in each economy. In section five, the common regional and specific national barriers for RE development are discussed in detail. Section five also contains our recommendations about ways to ensure energy security through regional energy cooperation, and characterizes the essential components of comprehensive national policies to enable a fuller utilization of the RE potential existing in Central Asia. Finally, section six presents our conclusions.

This article explores Russia's engagement with Northeast Asia (NEA) in the area of oil and gas and examines the sustainability of Russia's energy policy vis-à-vis Asia. The study argues that: (1) Russia's eastward shift is a pragmatic choice to escape the evolution of the EU's energy-governance institutions to establish a uniformly regulated European energy market, which has become increasingly incompatible with Russia's state-capitalism mode of energy governance; (2) Russia's region-specific (Eastern Siberia and Far East) and sector-specific (oil and gas) arrangements prove to be an expedient means to forge Russia's energy ties with the geopolitically complex region of NEA; (3) to succeed in the long-term, Russia needs to replace its reactive energy policy towards Asia with a proactive attitude vis-à-vis both the evolving individual energy policies of NEA countries and the ongoing institutionalization of the energy markets in the region as a whole.

Knowledge intensive business services (KIBS) are special in that they rely on knowledge exchange between service providers and consumers and thus intensive cooperation between the two parties is essential at all stages. This implies approaches to find the "right" provider may have to differ from those used in the sector of more homogeneous services and goods. Public procurement regulation aims to improve competitiveness, yet does this help achieving the best value for money in the procurement of KIBS? Legislative constraints on the types of admissible public procurement mechanisms may have an undesirable effect on the provider selection, meaning that services may not be purchased from the most efficient or the most suitable provider. As a benchmark, private consumers are unconstrained in their choice of KIBS providers. We exploit this difference to study the efficiency of KIBS purchases by the public sector, as compared to that in the private sector. Using the 2007 and 2011 waves of a unique survey of KIBS consumers in Russia, we find, inter alia, that the public sector reports lower satisfaction from KIBS and admits a lower level of co-production than the private sector. Our main recommendations refer to the optimal choice of public procurement methods.

Governments promote pro-environmental behavior explicitly, through regulatory provisions, or implicitly, by setting general environmental objectives without explicit requirements. Shared values and commitment to government objectives supposedly help towards greener behavior. We argue that the lack of explicit guidance counteracts, especially if green options are perceived as conflicting with strict regulatory requirements on other issues. In Russian public procurement, organizations are subject to either a rigid procurement law, or a flexible law, or both; neither law formalizes environmental priorities or approaches. We design a survey on practices of green procurement, collecting 223 responses from the whole range of organizations subject to public procurement regulation. Results from probit regressions, robustified on further 800 responses from an additional survey and 250,000 official procurement records, show that regulatory rigidity hinders green practices. Federal authorities are more likely to apply environmental criteria than local governments, but this is rather due to the expertise of their staff than to their commitment to governmental objectives. Publicly funded institutions are less likely to adopt green procurement than state corporations. Caution and avoidance of unintended contraventions seem to impede adoption of green procurement. Provision of information, guidance and improved expertise can help overcome this effect.

According to representatives of the exact sciences, as well as philosophers and methodologists of the humanities, the epistemological status of pedagogy today is quite low. There are no verified regulations for the empirical, theoretical and contextual substantiation of conclusions and methods for obtaining them; the voices of the theoreticians of pedagogical science about the structure and component composition of pedagogical theory sound polyphonic. The differences between theory and concept, long recognized in the science of science, do not find the right understanding and response in pedagogical works. Pedagogy, being an integral member of the community of human sciences, must today enter into an active and meaningful scientific dialogue with methodologists, science scholars, humanists, who represent a "strong" version of human knowledge. De­scribed by the famous Russian philosopher L.A. Mikeshina's methodological dia­logues prompted us to take up the urgently required concretization of the author's interesting conclusions and arguments in relation to the methodology of pedagogy which L.A. Mikeshina presents as transfer of terms (extrapolation). Based on the analysis of the cited book and many works of philosophers and teachers, we man­aged to build a triad of criteria for correct extrapolation of terms: a) address cor­rectness; correspondence of the pedagogical sound of the term transferred to ped­agogy to that which is accepted in donor science; b) the creative focus of the transferred term; c) detachment from repetition of the well-known method of noise stylistic reproduction. As one of the examples of the transfer of knowledge into pedagogy, the author considers the absorption by the science of education of the stylistics of related sciences based on scientific metaphors. The second part of the article is devoted to the theoretical construction of pedagogy. A methodologi­cal screen of a particular pedagogical theory is presented, white spots of the topic are revealed, the idea of theoretical constructions in pedagogy, reflected qualita­tively and quantitatively, is proposed. The connection between the problem of knowledge transfer (1) and the theoretical construction of pedagogy (2) is shown.