Renewable Energy Politics: Policy Typologies,Policy Tools,and State Deployment of Renewables

This paper investigates the competing forces driving the development of renewable energy in the American states. We formulate a framework of state renewable energy politics and develop a set of hypotheses regarding the role of politics, policies, and prices in renewable energy development. We test these hypotheses with a fixed effect vector decomposition model using a panel data set for the U.S. states from 1990 to 2008. The results indicate that renewable energy development is influenced by regulatory institutions, the party affiliations of the governor and legislators, and the professionalism of the legislature, accompanied by the effects of various policy instruments.     

Typologies,Databases, and Historic Ethnography

Historical Archaeology - Robert L. Schuyler’s 1978 edited volume Historical Archaeology: A Guide to Substantive and Theoretical Contributions was a compendium of most of the field’s...     

十一面观音像式研究--以汉藏造像对比研究为中心

传佛教中的供养神,最早最重要的是观音,在观音的诸多身形中,又以十一面观音这一身形传入的为最早,据《西藏王统记》载,当年松赞干布(617-650)为了寻找自己的本尊神,曾派化僧去南印度等地,请来了十一面观音等像,也就是说十一面观音像式至少在7世纪就传入吐蕃作为吐蕃赞普的本尊神受到供养。同样在汉传佛教中,十一面观音经在北周时期就有译经传入,经中也有详细的造像样式描述。但通过实际调查及图像的排比,发现十一面观音像由于传播途径不同,实际上存在两个像式系统,即汉一-日系统和印-藏系统。本以佛教造像中最具典型意义的十一面观音像为中心,讨论其流传像式。     

Typologies of Memory and Forgetting among the Expatriates of Rabaul

In recent years considerable attention has been directed to memory and the relationships between memory and history, the past and the present. However, the related issue of forgetting remains misunderstood. The oral testimonies of three current and former expatriates in Rabaul--Julian Murphy, John Beagley and Jean Bourke--provide us with an opportunity to rethink some of the dilemmas of memory by focusing our attention on such issues as nostalgia, the passage of time, sensory memories, and place. Much of the research on memory in the social sciences is defined by a lack of engagement with medical writings on similar themes. Yet the possibilities for mutual interaction and exchange between the social and physical sciences are endless, enabling more in-depth studies and analysis of memory and forgetting.     

Benefits,safety, and risks of immunisation programmes

Abstract

Immunisation is potentially the most effective and efficient of all preventive medical activities. It is also unique among interventions in that it protects both the individual and the community. The UK's immunisation programme has been highly successful in controlling a number of life threatening infectious diseases, and consequently public concern has shifted from the diseases to vaccine safety. In recent years a series of vaccine myths and vaccine safety scares have affected the UK and other industrialised countries. Although an effective vaccine without any risk is probably unachievable, the vaccines in use in the UK are very safe. Serious adverse outcomes truly attributable to vaccination are extremely rare, always far rarer than adverse outcomes among individuals acquiring the vaccines' target infections. Vaccine safety may be called into question, however, on the basis of spurious coincidental associations between vaccination and adverse events. An inadequate public health response in the 1970s to a scare over whooping cough vaccine allowed substantial losses of professional and public confidence to take place. Vaccine coverage halved and much preventable morbidity and mortality resulted. Plausible vaccine associations must be investigated thoroughly, and the UK has become a world leader in developing techniques for rapid investigations. The public health response to scares over MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella) vaccine safety has been faster and firmer than for whooping cough and no link has been found between MMR vaccine and inflammatory bowel disease or autism. Consequently the impact on immunisation coverage has been small, though the cumulative threat of measles, mumps, and rubella epidemics is growing. Recently an international investigation excluded a possible association of intussusception with oral polio vaccine before it could become a vaccine scare. A clearer chain of communication in responding to vaccine myths and scares is needed. This must provide rapid information and, if appropriate, reassurance to professionals and the public. Considerably more training is needed for professionals in providing information to the public and supporting parents in making difficult decisions over vaccination. Though there is no place for complacency, and improvements are needed, the UK's ability to monitor vaccine effectiveness, safety, and risks is strong. As a consequence it has a vaccination programme that is very safe and very effective.     

Advocacy Coalitions, Policy Entrepreneurs, and Policy Change

The advocacy coalition framework (AC) explains policy stability The policy entrepreneurship model (PE) explains dynamic policy change. Thus, augmenting the AC with insights from the PE provides a method of explaining a common empirical phenomenon: policy stability punctuated by dynamic policy change. This analytical strategy could be used to explore stability and change in many policy arenas. Here, we use it to interpret the background lo and dynamics of recent education policy reform in Michigan.     

Policy Travels: Exploring Politics, Policy, and Culture from the Ground-Up

Mark Hertsgaard, Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future . New York, NY: Broadway Books, 1998. 372 pp.
Robert D. Kaplan, An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future . New York, NY: Random House, 1998. 393 pp.     

From Savages and Barbarians to Primitives: Africa,Social Typologies,and History in Eighteenth–Century French Philosophy

This article describes the conceptual framework (what I call a “style of reasoning”) within which knowledge about Africa was legitimized in eighteenth–century French philosophy. The article traces a shift or rupture in this conceptual framework which, at the end of the eighteenth century, led to the emergence of new conditions for knowledge legitimation that altered Europe’s perception of Africa. The article examines these two conceptual frameworks within the context of a discussion of the social theory of the time, which categorized Africans first as savages, and then, with the advent of our modern “style of reasoning,” as primitives. The argument used to demonstrate this change in categorizations is historical. (In the terminology of Michel Foucault, the paper is an “archaeological” investigation of knowledge about Africa.) The greater part of the article analyzes in detail the principal social theory of Enlightenment philosophy, the stadial theory of society, with the aim of demonstrating how it determined what could be affirmed about Africa. The shift in the perception of Africans from savages to primitives involved an epistemological change in how societies were grasped. The article provides a greater understanding of the constitution of Africa as a cognitive construct, which is not only of theoretical concern; this construct shaped Europe’s intervention in Africa, and continues to influence what we believe Africa is and should become.     

Global Public Policy,Transnational Policy Communities,and Their Networks

Public policy has been a prisoner of the word “state.” Yet, the state is reconfigured by globalization. Through “global public–private partnerships” and “transnational executive networks,” new forms of authority are emerging through global and regional policy processes that coexist alongside nation‐state policy processes. Accordingly, this article asks what is “global public policy”? The first part of the article identifies new public spaces where global policies occur. These spaces are multiple in character and variety and will be collectively referred to as the “global agora.” The second section adapts the conventional policy cycle heuristic by conceptually stretching it to the global and regional levels to reveal the higher degree of pluralization of actors and multiple‐authority structures than is the case at national levels. The third section asks: who is involved in the delivery of global public policy? The focus is on transnational policy communities. The global agora is a public space of policymaking and administration, although it is one where authority is more diffuse, decision making is dispersed and sovereignty muddled. Trapped by methodological nationalism and an intellectual agoraphobia of globalization, public policy scholars have yet to examine fully global policy processes and new managerial modes of transnational public administration.     

Ideology,Power, and the Structure of Policy Networks

This article investigates the role of power and ideology in the endogenous formation of policy networks. According to the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF), shared ideology (conceptualized as a system of policy‐relevant beliefs and values) is the primary driver of collaboration within policy subsystems. On the other hand, Resource Dependency Theory suggests that power‐seeking is an important rationale behind network structure, and that collaborative ties are formed primarily on the basis of perceived influence. Hypotheses are tested using a new method of egocentric network correlation, based on survey data of policy networks in five regional planning subsystems in California (N = 506). Results suggest that ideology is an important force behind network cohesion: Not only do policy elites systematically avoid networking with ideologically dissimilar actors but collaborative ties are also systematically formed among actors with shared beliefs. Power‐seeking does not operate on a network‐wide scale but may drive network formation among coalitions of ideologically similar agents.