Suchergebnisse

We argue, due to the conspicuous failure of Washington Consensus-guided reforms in most part of the developing world in 1990s and the outbreak of the current global financial crisis, Washington Consensus, as a general term of the neoliberal free market economic thinking, has been withering. In the meantime, Chinese economic model has gain wide recognition and praise worldwide. Joshua C. Ramo coined the term of Beijing Consensus as an alternative approach to economic development for developing nations. There has been hot debate on the notion of Beijing Consensus. We argue even though there are some problems in Ramo's original definition of Beijing Consensus, we should not reject this notion altogether. Instead, we should try to come up with better conceptualizations of this term. In this paper, we sum up ten general principles of the Chinese development model as our new definition of the Beijing Consensus.

The United Nations Conference on Certain Conventional Weapons (UNCCW) is the only multilateral humanitarian arms control forum. Yet the consensus principle by which it makes decisions has repeatedly thwarted progress and is endangering the current process on the use of autonomy in weapons systems: if negotiations for a legally binding instrument are not launched in 2021, this goal is likely to be pursued outside the UNCCW. Failure to ban inhumane technology for a third time in a row would considerably damage the legitimacy of the UNCCW. Emphasizing that the UNCCW must remain the main venue not only for discussing but also for resolving humanitarian arms control issues, this policy brief argues for an alternative: a procedural reform that would replace consensus voting with two-thirds majority voting.

Endocrine disruption is a specific form of toxicity, where natural and/or anthropogenic chemicals, known as "endocrine disruptors" (EDs), trigger adverse health effects by disrupting the endogenous hormone system. There is need to harmonize guidance on the regulation of EDs, but this has been hampered by what appeared as a lack of consensus among scientists. This publication provides summary information about a consensus reached by a group of world-leading scientists that can serve as the basis for the development of ED criteria in relevant EU legislation. Twenty-three international scientists from different disciplines discussed principles and open questions on ED identification as outlined in a draft consensus paper at an expert meeting hosted by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) in Berlin, Germany on 11-12 April 2016. Participants reached a consensus regarding scientific principles for the identification of EDs. The paper discusses the consensus reached on background, definition of an ED and related concepts, sources of uncertainty, scientific principles important for ED identification, and research needs. It highlights the difficulty in retrospectively reconstructing ED exposure, insufficient range of validated test systems for EDs, and some issues impacting on the evaluation of the risk from EDs, such as non-monotonic dose-response and thresholds, modes of action, and exposure assessment. This report provides the consensus statement on EDs agreed among all participating scientists. The meeting facilitated a productive debate and reduced a number of differences in views. It is expected that the consensus reached will serve as an important basis for the development of regulatory ED criteria.

Two Phenomena Have Converged in recent years to account for the current interest among international lawyers in the concept of the "consensus" of states. The first is the recognition in jurisprudence that all law, and particularly the international legal system with its lack of centrally organized sanctions, is founded on inductively verifiable psychology and not in deductive principles purportedly derived from God, nature, or reason. If international law is nothing more or less than what states (national decisionmakers and their counsel) think it is, then do not particular rules of international law owe their existence and transmutations to the flow of international consensus?

Endocrine disruption is a specific form of toxicity, where natural and/or anthropogenic chemicals, known as "endocrine disruptors" (EDs), trigger adverse health effects by disrupting the endogenous hormone system. There is need to harmonize guidance on the regulation of EDs, but this has been hampered by what appeared as a lack of consensus among scientists. This publication provides summary information about a consensus reached by a group of world-leading scientists that can serve as the basis for the development of ED criteria in relevant EU legislation. Twenty-three international scientists from different disciplines discussed principles and open questions on ED identification as outlined in a draft consensus paper at an expert meeting hosted by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR) in Berlin, Germany on 11-12 April 2016. Participants reached a consensus regarding scientific principles for the identification of EDs. The paper discusses the consensus reached on background, definition of an ED and related concepts, sources of uncertainty, scientific principles important for ED identification, and research needs. It highlights the difficulty in retrospectively reconstructing ED exposure, insufficient range of validated test systems for EDs, and some issues impacting on the evaluation of the risk from EDs, such as non-monotonic dose-response and thresholds, modes of action, and exposure assessment. This report provides the consensus statement on EDs agreed among all participating scientists. The meeting facilitated a productive debate and reduced a number of differences in views. It is expected that the consensus reached will serve as an important basis for the development of regulatory ED criteria.