Open Door or Sphere of Influence?: The Diplomacy of the Japanese–French Entente and Fukien Question, 1905–1907

Japanese–French negotiation for their 1907 entente revealed contrasting approaches to the application of the Open Door principle in China, particularly to the Fukien province after the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War. Having learned about France's wish to receive Japanese guarantee for the safety of its colony in Indo-China, Japan strove to define Fukien as its additional sphere of influence once it had secured much needed loans in the Paris financial market. France tried to resist Japan's request to define Fukien as its sphere by adopting a secret note, and attempted to restrain Japan's future expansion into China by enmeshing Japan in the web of political and financial ententes with itself and Britain supporting Open Door. This approach of France was a continuation of French policy toward East Asia since the Boxer Uprising, securing its economic interests by supporting Open Door rather than pursuing territorial competition with other great powers in China. In contrast, the Japanese government strenuously attempted to weaken the general application of Open Door doctrine in China, and could define Fukien as Japan's additional sphere by securing a secret explanatory note for such a purpose.     

Emerging vacuums of strategic planning: an exploration of reforms in Finnish spatial planning

The paper offers a theory-based evaluation of the ongoing reforms in the Finnish spatial planning regime. The paper argues that Finnish planning is moving in a reactive and market-driven direction. This development is not being brought about solely through a direct decrease in public discretionary powers in planning, but is also unfolding indirectly through a process of rescaling in the spatial planning regime. These processes increase municipal autonomy in relation to other planning scales, despite problems observed in the municipality-centred market-driven planning orientation. The resulting reduction in manoeuvring room in public planning is conceptualized in the paper as expanding vacuums of strategic planning. Building on concepts from the literature on state transformation theory and scale theory, the paper draws together theoretical and empirical conclusions from several case studies conducted in close-to-administration projects.     

Crime Risk Maps: A Multivariate Spatial Analysis of Crime Data

In crime analyses, maps showing the degree of risk help police departments to make decisions on operational matters, such as where to patrol or how to deploy police officers. This study statistically models spatial crime data for multiple crime types in order to produce joint crime risk maps. To effectively model and map the spatial crime data, we consider two important characteristics of crime occurrences: the spatial dependence between sites, and the dependence between multiple crime types. We reflect both characteristics in the model simultaneously using a generalized multivariate conditional autoregressive model. As a real‐data application, we examine the number of incidents of vehicle theft, larceny, and burglary in 83 census tracts of San Francisco in 2010. Then, we employ a Bayesian approach using a Markov chain Monte Carlo method to estimate the model parameters. Based on the results, we detect the crime hotspots, thus demonstrating the advantage of using a multivariate spatial analysis for crime data.     

Citizen Participation,Process, and Transparency in Local Government: An Exploratory Study

This study had two purposes. First, it empirically examined the relationship between citizens' participation in administrative policymaking phases and their perception of government transparency. Second, it investigated how citizens' use of both offline and online participation channels and their involvement in different phases of policymaking (i.e., agenda setting, implementation, and evaluation) were related to their assessment of transparency in government. A 2009 survey of residents of Seoul, South Korea, was used to test the study hypotheses. Using two‐stage least squares estimate techniques, the study found that citizens involved in any citizen participation programs are more likely than those not involved to positively assess transparency in government. With regard to the relationship between participation channels and transparency, citizens who used offline participation channels were more likely than nonusers to perceive enhanced transparency in local government. However, their use of online participation channels had limited effect on perceptions of transparency. Finally, participation in two phases of the policy process, agenda setting and evaluation, positively affected citizens' assessment of transparency in government.     

Der Weg zum Flussgebietsmanagement

Zusammenfassung Der Flussgebietsansatz ist ein zentrales Element der Wasserrahmenrichtlinie (WRRL) und wurde in Deutschland im Zuge der organisatorischen Umsetzung der Richtlinie strukturell implementiert. Die Kooperationsstrukturen auf Flussgebietsebene sollen dabei einen funktionierenden Rahmen auch für die fachliche Umsetzung der Richtlinie bilden. Beim dazu erforderlichen strukturellen Wandel waren insbesondere die in den Flussgebieten bereits vorhandenen Kooperationsstrukturen von Bedeutung. Diese wurden entweder ausgebaut, umstrukturiert oder von neuen Strukturen zur Umsetzung der WRRL überlagert. Die dabei zum Teil entstandenen Doppelstrukturen erh?hen jedoch den Koordinierungsaufwand der Akteure stark, so dass es aktuell zu einer Zusammenführung und Konsolidierungsbewegung kommt. Allerdings wird auch nach der Konsolidierung eine gro?e strukturelle Vielfalt in den Flussgebieten verbleiben, die durch eine enge Zusammenarbeit der Akteure zu bew?ltigen ist. Es bleibt abzuwarten, inwiefern diese Strukturen sich auch eignen, um neuen Herausforderungen, wie beispielsweise den Folgen des Klimawandels, zu begegnen.     

Increasing Role of Services in Competitive Power and Innovativeness of Firms and Industrial Clusters

The aim of this paper is to discuss the importance of different types of global services for industrial firms and clusters in terms of their economic competitiveness and innovative performance. The theoretical debates argue that globalization, deregulation and the new production organization make it necessary to use global services that are supplied easily with the help of new telecommunication technologies. The existing empirical studies provide some supporting evidence. However, they also indicate that global service firms can be attained by only smaller numbers of industrial firms and clusters. Still, in-house services besides temporal and informal mechanisms are important to meet the needs of the specialized services, even for the firms that try to become a part of the global production system. The paper focuses on three main questions: “What types of global services are becoming crucial for manufacturing firms and what type of services are still local and national? Is there a significant difference between the characteristics of firms that use the same type of services? To what extent is having access to global services important for the innovativeness of industrial firms and clusters? This paper looks for the answers to these questions based on existing case studies as well as this study of three industrial clusters in Turkey. The findings indicate that there is not a perfect match between theory and empirical evidence and there is a need for more refined theoretical discourses on industry–service relations.     

"三国同谋论"分析:朝鲜战争起源的再思考

在朝鲜战争起源的问题上,学术界一直存在着争论.一些西方学者认为,朝鲜战争是在苏联、中国和朝鲜周密的共谋下发动的,这种说法后来被称为"三国同谋论".但这种说法与最近公开的资料并不相符.本文以中国、苏联的新资料为依据对以往的"三国共谋论"进行了反驳,并得出结论:中国不仅没有参加策划朝鲜战争,而且在一定程度上对发动这场战争持不赞成的态度.