Tracing Process to Performance of Collaborative Governance: A Comparative Case Study of Federal Hydropower Licensing

Despite collaborative governance's popularity, whether collaboration improves policy performance remains uncertain. This study assesses the link between collaborative decision making and licensed environmental management protocols in the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission's (FERC's) process for licensing hydropower facilities in the United States. Using results from a previous study of FERC relicensing (Ulibarri, forthcoming), one high‐, one medium‐, and one low‐collaboration case were selected. Using documents including meeting minutes, public comments, and issued licenses, I assessed collaboration and license outputs, then conducted process tracing to examine whether and how differences in collaboration produced differences in license quality. High collaboration resulted in jointly developed and highly implementable operating regimes designed to improve numerous resources, while low collaboration resulted in operating requirements that ignored environmental concerns raised by stakeholders and lacked implementation provisions. These results support the hypothesis that collaboration can improve environmental outcomes, revealing the pragmatic value of collaboration. [Correction added on 13 January 2015, after first online publication: the occurrences of ‘0’ in the abstract were erroneous and have now been corrected.]     

Collaboration and Partnership Development for Sustainable Tourism

Abstract

For many years, the need to improve sustainability in the tourism industry has been widely recognized. Many destinations have attempted to move toward sustainability, but unfortunately, have been hindered in their attempts by a lack of collaboration among stakeholders that is necessary to support their sustainability agendas. Collaboration, specifically through multi-stakeholder partnerships, has been seen as an effective way to support initiatives in tourism development. Through the lens of Gray's collaboration theory and Selin and Chavez's tourism partnership model, the success of collaboration and partnerships in tourism development on the island of Gili Trawangan, Indonesia, will be examined. Through a multi-method approach consisting of an environmental audit and semi-structured interviews, this paper explores the implementation of a multi-stakeholder partnership. The partnership that has been developed, called the Gili Ecotrust, provides an example of successful collaboration, leading to the implementation of innovative sustainability initiatives on the island.     

The Rise and Fall of a Partnership: The British Council and the Islamic Republic of Iran (2001–09)

This paper examines a partnership between the British Council and the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) that emerged in March 2001 as a result of their shared aspiration for collaboration in scientific, academic and cultural arena. The alliance came as a surprise because after twenty-three years of antagonism on the part of the government of the IRI, the hostile attitudes were put aside virtually overnight to reunite with an old adversary for a mutual collaboration. The present qualitative study examines the reasons behind the start of the partnership, the domains within which the British Council was permitted to operate in Iran, and the reasons behind the end of the partnership. The data were gathered from various sources, including field-notes, policy documents analysis, personal interviews, and various online sources. The findings reveal that the duration of the partnership was closely intertwined with the rise and fall of the reformist administration, under President Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005). The partnership began mainly due to efforts made by the reformist administration to take the IRI out of its international isolation and thus became inactive not long after the reformist administration, and eventually came to an end in January 2009, under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.     

Collaboration in Print: the ‘Aktion Ritterbusch’ and the failure of German intellectual propaganda in occupied Denmark, 1940–1942

During the Second World War, Germany's National Socialist regime mobilized German universities in order to support the war efforts through academic collaboration and a number of publications that were meant to legitimize Germany's territorial ambitions. The rector of the University of Kiel, Dr Paul Ritterbusch, was put in charge of the operation, which became known as the Aktion Ritterbusch. While earlier accounts have focussed on the Aktion Ritterbusch's endeavours in Germany itself and its ambitions in Western and Eastern Europe, this article shows how Ritterbusch also extended his efforts to Denmark.     

Facilitating international fieldwork: the receptive services of New Zealand’s geography community

This study aims to provide preliminary insight into facilitating international fieldwork in New Zealand by researchers and universities who support visiting university groups. Anonymous online surveys sought views of supporting researchers (15 respondents), and supported scholars (8 respondents). The extent to which international fieldwork is facilitated by partnerships with local institutions depends upon the nature, scope and location of the visiting field trip, and the willingness and ability of the local community to provide that support. Where provided, support was diverse and perceived to contribute positively to student learning. Both supporting researcher and supported scholar perceive value in these connections.     

Building Bridges Through Performance and Decision‐making: Schools,Research and Public Engagement

Abstract: This paper uses the impact agenda in the UK to realign debate about the relationship between schools, universities and (human) geography. It positions this debate in systemic tendencies within UK higher education. It argues that, whilst impact can be seen as a further instance of neoliberalism, emphasising the gap between accountability and accounting allows an identification with communicative and reflexive knowledge and, more broadly, critical praxis. The paper draws on a year‐long research‐based collaboration with school teachers and their students involving performance work and the development of decision‐making curriculum materials. It argues that working in these ways with schools can provide the basis for public engagement partnerships between schools and universities and a means to constitute diverse research publics. In these ways, it is argued, a wider sense of impact can be reappropriated, to reclaim the critical subject and to constitute academic value     

Commercializing Science in Europe: The Cambridge Biotechnology Cluster

The article examines the variety of linkages firms have established with university science. These include using universities as a source of ideas for start-ups, scientific collaboration between firms and laboratories, the role of scientists on the scientific advisory boards of firms, and the role of universities in supplying firms with a labour market for talented scientists. These linkages are plentiful across Cambridge area biotechnology firms. However, and perhaps surprisingly, our evidence shows that a key actor, the University of Cambridge does not dominate the scientific linkages of the area's firms. A large percentage of Cambridge's firms do not derive from its university. The majority of scientific collaborations are not with University of Cambridge laboratories, nor do Cambridge scientists dominate the scientific advisory boards of firms. Moreover, the majority of scientists within area biotechnology firms appear not to have left University of Cambridge laboratories to move to industry.     

Research collaboration beyond the boundary: Evidence from university patents in China

Geographical distance constitutes friction in searching for research collaborators. Taking advantage of a quasinatural experiment featured by High-Speed Railway (HSR) lines in China, this paper employs the difference-in-differences model to identify the causal impact of a substantial improvement in the intercity transportation infrastructure on collaborative innovation across cities. The data pertain to a universe of patent applications filed by Chinese universities and their citations. We find that HSR contributes to a substantial increase in the innovation quantity and quality of collaborative patenting innovation between universities and corporates. It contributes to industry collaboration by utilizing university academic disciplines in the related technology fields. Lastly, HSR facilitates universities to search for new research partners with better quality beyond the geographical boundary.     

Two online surveys of Italian Internet audiences: A summary of findings

This article describes the main results of separate online surveys on two partly differentiated Italian Internet audiences. It argues that the two show more traits in common than dissimilarities and that their common characteristics are widely shared by the millions of Italian Internet users. On a comparison of the sample to the country as a whole, it emerges as better educated, more open-minded, more affluent, and young to middle-aged. These Internet audiences do not trust television, they rely on the Internet to provide them with news, entertainment, goods and services, and they are quite similar to other Internet users elsewhere in western Europe.     

Geography of Knowledge-based Collaboration in a Post-communist Country: Specific Experience or Generalized Pattern?

This article addresses the role of geographical proximity for knowledge and innovation collaboration patterns in the Czech Republic and assesses the factors which determine the spatial distribution of innovation co-operation. The article uses alternative sources of empirical data to map collaboration patterns of innovating companies, research institutes and universities and to find basic regularities. By this, the article aims to fill in the gap in current research focused rather on most advanced regions by adding new knowledge from a transformation, post-communist economy. Also, it aims to shed light on the issue of the role of proximity between actors involved in collaboration in the sphere of knowledge and innovation creation which still remains rather elusive. The findings indicate that even though co-location and intra-regional knowledge and innovation collaboration exist, it cannot be regarded as a decisive characteristic. Geographical proximity is not a crucial condition in knowledge and innovation collaboration as all actors are involved to an important degree in international linkages. Yet, the role of the specific institutional context and factors at micro-level influence the innovation co-operation pattern.     

Wandering scholars? Academic mobility and the British World, 1850–1940

At the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, held in London in 1903, delegates from across the universities of Britain's settler empire professed the existence of a British academic community, defined not by location, but by shared culture, shared values and shared ethnicity. This article examines the extent to which these claims reflected actual patterns of academic mobility in the settler empire between 1850 and 1940. By mapping the careers of the 350 professors who served at the Universities of Sydney, Toronto, and Manchester during this period, it concludes that, between 1900 and 1930 especially, there existed a distinctly British academic world within which scholars moved frequently along different migratory axes. Though not as united, extensive and uncomplicated as that in which the 1903 Conference delegates believed, this world nonetheless shared more in common with their vision of an expansive British academic community than it did with the image of an unconnected and isolated periphery that has characterised portrayals by subsequent university historians.     

Cultivating Personalized Museum Tours Online and On-Site

Abstract

Web 2.0 — the perceived second generation of the World Wide Web that aims to improve collaboration, sharing of information and interoperability — enables increasing access to digital collections of museums. The expectation is that more and more people will spend time preparing their visit before actually visiting the museum and look for related information reflecting on what they have seen or missed after visiting the museum. It can also be expected that museum curators want to enhance visitors' museum experiences in the more personalized, intensive and engaging way promised by an improved Web. In other words, to keep their visitors, they should adopt an immersive museum environment that combines the museum Web site (online) with the physical museum space (on-site). In this context, the CHIP (Cultural Heritage Information Presentation) project offers tools to the users to be their own curators, e.g. browsing the online collections, planning a personalized museum tour suiting their art interests, getting some recommendations about interesting artworks to see, and quickly finding their ways in the museum. In this paper, we present the new additions to the CHIP tools, which target such functionality: a Web-based museum Tour Wizard based on the user's interests and the Mobile Guide that converts the tours to a mobile device (PDA) used in the physical museum space. To connect the user's various interactions with these tools online and on-site, we built a dynamic user model. Online, the user model stores the user's personal background, ratings of artworks and art concepts, recommended or created museum tours. On-site, it is a conversion of the online user model stored in RDF into XML format which the mobile guide can parse. When the user rates artworks inside the physical museum, the on-site user model is updated and when the tour is finished, it is synchronized with the online user model. In such a way, we support a 'virtuous circle' of the museum visit, which links the personalized museum experiences both online and on-site.     

Collaborative Methods: A Comparison of Subfield Styles

Collaborative research partnerships between academic anthropologists and host or descendant communities are becoming more popular in anthropology. The reviewed books demonstrate there are different understandings of what collaboration means for professional identities and expertise across subfields. Therefore, such partnerships are unlikely to promote cross-subfield integration. Nevertheless, while their collaborative styles diverge, the reviewed authors are motivated by a shared interpretation of disciplinary responsibilities and opportunities that emerges from anthropology's longstanding commitment to fieldwork and also reflects post-World War II historical transformations. Their shared interpretation raises challenging questions for the discipline at large about professional practices like evaluation.     

Ethics and transparency in the field: lessons from the Arab Gulf

This viewpoint draws from feminist scholarship to critically examine an academic partnership between two universities based in the USA and in the Arab Gulf. In particular, feminist geography is used to inform cross-cultural projects such as this academic exchange among Arabs and Americans by focusing on ethics and transparency in the field. The complexity of cultural and institutional dynamics in this and related projects impacts our work with participants and in places where we conduct research. This analysis is based on collaboration between a public university in the USA and an all-women's university located in Bahrain, an Arab Gulf monarchy that has experienced violence stemming from socio-economic disparities and political tensions between the ruling Sunnis and the majority Shiite population. The project exemplifies a growing trend among Western universities to participate in academic partnerships that will generate financial resources while educating students in regions with limited access to higher education. The contradictions and dilemmas that arise in this academic engagement highlight the importance of ethics and transparency in cross-cultural university partnerships.     

The Greek University Stranded in the Policy of Establishing Regional Universities

The paper examines the policy implemented when it comes to establishing regional universities in a developed, yet semi-peripheral, EU country (i.e. Greece) and focuses on two central issues: whether regional universities contribute to local development and whether their location in the periphery harnessed their academic performance. The establishment of regional universities has become a widely used practice for facilitating regional development throughout the developed world, and the university's third role is quite widely accepted. The paper does not intend to question the policy of establishing regional universities itself, but rather the way these universities were established in Greece (as a case of a semi-peripheral regime) and possibly in other countries that are not in the forefront of international research. Regional universities in Greece were often established for clientelistic reasons; however, they do contribute in advancing local economic growth. These positive effects on the locality are often accompanied by a high cost for the Greek university and society itself, in the sense that regional universities have often been forced to operate under difficult conditions, thus undermining their fundamental mission (educational but primarily research).     

The University of the Future

Abstract

The economic and social pressures on universities will require a more flexible approach to education to be evolved if the system is to survive. An increasingly multicultural and multiethnic mix of students and the growing number of older students demand the ability to tailor programmes to the individuals concerned. Use of fibre optic and other high speed communications technology will be crucial in this endeavour, allowing courses to be pooled between institutions, while multimedia facilities and virtual reality offer students unrivalled opportunities to expand their educational experience. The future must also rest on increased collaboration with industry and in closer integration of universities into their local communities.     

Conflicts over shared rivers: Resource scarcity or fuzzy boundaries?

Countries that share rivers have a higher risk of military disputes, even when controlling for a range of standard variables from studies of interstate conflict. A study incorporating the length of the land boundary showed that the shared river variable is not just a proxy for a higher degree of interaction opportunity. A weakness of earlier work is that the existing shared rivers data do not distinguish properly between dyads where the rivers run mainly across the boundary and dyads where the shared river runs along the boundary. Dyads with rivers running across the boundary would be expected to give rise to resource scarcity-related conflict, while in dyads where the river forms the boundary conflict may arise because river boundaries are fluid and fuzzy. Using a new dataset on shared water basins and two measures of water scarcity, we test for the relevance of these two scenarios. Shared basins do predict an increased propensity for conflict in a multivariate analysis. However, we find little support for the fuzzy boundary scenario. Support for a scarcity theory of water conflict is somewhat ambiguous. Neither the number of river crossings nor the share of the basin upstream is significant. Dry countries have more conflict, but less so when the basin is large. Drought has no influence. The size of the basin, however, is significantly associated with conflict. Modernization theory receives some support in that development interacted with basin size predicts less conflict, and we find some evidence here for an environmental Kuznets curve. The importance of basin size suggests a possible ‘resource curse’ effect for water resources.     

The Board of Deputies of British Jews and the initial phase of the Italian Racial Laws: reactions and strategies (1938–1940)

ABSTRACT

This article aims to reconstruct the activities of the Board of Jewish Deputies, the central representative body of British Jewry, in support of the Italian Jews affected by the Fascist Racial Laws of 1938. By analysing the institution’s documents and examining the most widely read Jewish newspaper in the U.K., the Jewish Chronicle, this research investigates how the initial phase of the Italian anti-Semitic campaign was received in Great Britain, and what measures were put in place by British Jewry in their attempts to help the Italian Jews. The Jewish historian, Cecil Roth, played an important role during this phase, in active collaboration with the leadership of the Board and the staff of the Jewish Chronicle, gathering as much information as possible on Italy and its history in order to shed light on the events that were taking place during the first years of the Racial Laws and until the entrance of Italy into WWII (1938–1940). The involvement of certain members of the Foreign Office with links to the Board, and the shared goal of helping Italian Jewry, was also fundamental in this period.     

Complacent young citizens or cross-generational solidarity? An analysis of Australian attitudes to democratic politics

Negativity towards mainstream politics is at an all-time high, with young people often targeted as the issue. However, are young people really to blame for political malaise? This article seeks to make sense of contemporary debate about political disenchantment in Australia using a cluster analysis to compare levels of complacency across generational cohorts. In this, we find no evidence to support the idea that Australians of any age cohort are complacent about their democracy. Although, there is some evidence of attitudinal differences between cohorts, criticisms of the practice of politics are also widely shared. Moreover, a majority of citizens appear to favour a mix of reforms combining mechanisms to open-up representative politics with opportunities for more direct intervention. To this end, we rebuke the narrative of a specific apathetic or disconnected Australian age cohort.     

Investments in Scientific Research: Examining the Funding Threshold Effects on Scientific Collaboration and Variation by Academic Discipline

This paper seeks to examine how federal financial support of academic scientists shapes their collaborative behavior. More specifically, it investigates two questions: (i) are there threshold sizes of federal grants that have effects on collaboration? and (ii) do the threshold sizes differ by discipline? To test and model these questions, this paper uses data collected in a 2004–2005 survey by the Research Valuing Mapping Project (a project based at Georgia Tech and led by Barry Bozeman) of 2,086 academically based research scientists and engineers. The analysis in this paper reaffirms the positive relationship between federal funding and collaboration seen in previous works, but the findings suggest that there is in fact a threshold effect—as the positive relationship has a diminishing influence. The findings of this paper are more limited with respect to how academic disciplines’ threshold levels differ. The results indicate a difference in the threshold levels between disciplines for three of the eight models.