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Archaeologists have long encountered evidence of natural disasters through excavation and stratigraphy. In Surviving Sudden Environmental Change, case studies examine how eight different past human communities-ranging from Arctic to equatorial regi
Systemic thinking in peacebuilding This is the first comprehensive publication analysing the value added by integrating systemic thinking and peacebuilding theory and practice. Against the background of different case studies, practitioners and scholars frame their various understandings of systemic thinking and present a great variety of systemic concepts, such as systems theory, systemic action research and constellation work. Furthermore, this volume links current discussions about peacebuilding with various systemic discourses. It analyses to what extent systemic thinking and systemic methods are helpful in further developing existing approaches to conflict transformation. In addition, most recent debates in the peacebuilding field, e.g. on liberal peace, the relevance of conflict analysis for strategy planning, bridging the attribution gap, the non-linearity of conflict dynamics, etc., are taken aacount of.
The SRI phenomenon is said to be entering the mainstream of financial intermediation. From a fairly marginal practice promoted or campaigned for by NGO’s and at odds with financial practice and orthodoxy it grew into well formulated policy adopted by a wide range of investors. Academic literature on SRI has also boomed on the assumption that mainstreaming is taking place. However, little thinking has been carried out on questions specifically arising from this alleged ‘mainstreaming’. This book, addressed to those with a scholarly or practitioner’s interest in SRI, starts filling this neglected dimension. Today, one cannot ignore the difficulties of main stream financing. The financi...
In The Community of Interest Approach in International Water Law, Julie Gjørtz Howden identifies the normative elements of the community of interest approach (COIA) in international water law, and demonstrates how the approach can provide a legal framework for common management of international watercourses. Through analyses of various features of international watercourse cooperation and common management, the book determines the main principles and the underlying values of the COIA, and discusses how the approach contributes to the development of international water law. Although the COIA is one of the central theories of international water law, very few analytical accounts of its legal features exist. Through The Community of Interest Approach in International Water Law, Howden offers a new and fresh approach to international water law that pulls together questions of holistic management, State sovereignty, public participation and river basin organisations into the analyses of the COIA and its relevance for managing transboundary watercourses today.
Experts offer theoretical and empirical analyses that view the regulation of transboundary air pollution as a dynamic process. Governing the Air looks at the regulation of air pollution not as a static procedure of enactment and agreement but as a dynamic process that reflects the shifting interrelationships of science, policy, and citizens. Taking transboundary air pollution in Europe as its empirical focus, the book not only assesses the particular regulation strategies that have evolved to govern European air, but also offers theoretical insights into dynamics of social order, political negotiation, and scientific practices. These dynamics are of pivotal concern today, in light of emergin...
Following the publication of C. S. Holling's seminal work on the relationship between animal body mass patterns and scale-specific landscape structure, ecologists began to explore the theoretical and applied consequences of discontinuities in ecosystems and other complex systems. Are ecosystems and their components continuously distributed and do they adhere to scaling laws, or are they discontinuous and more complex than early models would have us believe? The resulting propositions over the structure of complex systems sparked an ongoing debate regarding the mechanisms generating discontinuities and the statistical methods used for their detection. This volume takes the view that ecosystem...
Development of various energy sources continues across North America and around the world, raising questions about social and economic consequences for the places and communities where these activities occur. Energy Impacts brings together important new research on site-level social, economic, and behavioral impacts from large-scale energy development. Featuring conceptual and empirical multidisciplinary research from leading social scientists, the volume collects a broad range of perspectives to understand North America’s current energy uses and future energy needs. Twelve chapters from respected scholars in a variety of disciplines present new ways to consider and analyze energy impact r...
The increasingly global study of policy processes faces challenges with scholars applying theories in radically different national and cultural contexts. Questions frequently arise about how to conduct policy process research comparatively and among this global community of scholars. Methods of the Policy Process is the first book to remedy this situation, not by establishing an orthodoxy or imposing upon the policy process community a rigid way of conducting research but, instead, by allowing the leading researchers in the different theoretical traditions a space to share the means by which they put their research into action. This edited volume serves as a companion volume and supplemental...
This book explores how the state can foster collective action by fisher’s communities in fisheries management. It presents a different perspective from Elinor Ostrom’s classic work on the eight institutional conditions that foster collective action in natural resource management and instead emphasizes the role of the state in fisheries co-management, engaging a state-centric notion of ‘meta-governance’. It argues that first, the state is required to foster collective action by fishers; and secondly, that the current fisheries co-management arrangements are state-centric. The study develops these arguments through the analysis of three case studies in Japan, Vietnam and Norway. The author also makes a theoretical contribution to governance literature by developing Ostrom’s ‘society-centric’ framework in a way which makes it more amenable to the analysis of state capacity and government intervention in a comparative context. This book will appeal to students and scholars of global governance, fisheries management, co-management, and crisis management, as well as practitioners of fisheries management.
Many societal challenges defy simple solutions within the grasp of one academic discipline, a single type of organization, or a country acting alone. Such “wicked problems” require collaboration that crosses social, political, or geographic boundaries. Collaboration across boundaries is increasingly seen as a necessary way forward, whether for the cases of education, health care, community policing, or international trade. At the same time, collaboration poses its own challenges, and what is more, so too does crossing boundaries. Regardless of the skill set required to achieve a particular goal, collaboration and crossing boundaries make their own demands. Crossing Boundaries for Collabo...