Agency Evolution, New Institutionalism, and 'Hybrid' Policy Domains: Lessons from the 'Greening' of the U.S. Military

Neoinstitutionalists applying the logic of rational choice institutionalism have leavened our understanding of public agency design and evolution in the domestic and national security policy domains. This paper seeks to advance theory building in empirically grounded ways by assessing the explanatory power of an important theoretical perspective (rational choice institutionalism), in an understudied "hybrid" policy domain where domestic and national security aims interact (domestic environmental policy and national security policy), and in an organizational type (the U.S. military) that has drawn scant attention from students of bureaucracy in political science, public administration, or public management. Analysis of three major efforts to green the U.S. military suggests that the patterns of politics accompanying agency evolution involving hybrid policy domains differ from domestic and national security domains in ways that limit the generalizability of rational choice institutionalism.     

Heather moorland in the Scottish Highlands: the history of a cultural landscape, 1600–1880

The heather moorland of the Scottish Highlands represents a highly symbolic habitat for the region. Significantly, recent work by ecologists and palaeobotanists has stressed the strong anthropogenic role in its development. Indeed, so vital is the role played by human interference, heather moorland is now seen as a cultural landscape. Yet despite being seen as a cultural landscape, there has hitherto been no attempt to use available documentary evidence to understand how this human interference may have affected its development over recent centuries. This paper examines such evidence, paying particular attention to how human activity contributed to its expansion over the early modern period and to its decline from ca. 1800 onwards, exploring such themes as moor burning, the harvesting of young tree growth, and grazing levels and practices, both before and after the clearances. Particular attention is paid to how the spread of sheep after the clearances contributed to the decline of heather moor and the role that heavy sheep grazing may have played in the deterioration in the quality of Highlands pastures during the mid-nineteenth century.     

HIGHWAY INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENT AND COUNTY EMPLOYMENT GROWTH: A DYNAMIC PANEL REGRESSION ANALYSIS*

ABSTRACT This paper uses recent advances in dynamic panel econometrics to examine the impact of highway infrastructure on aggregate county‐level employment using data for all 100 North Carolina counties from 1985 through 1997. Results are compared to models that do not take endogeneity of highway investment and dynamics of employment adjustment into account. Fully specified dynamic models are found to give insignificant results compared to these other models. Thus, when these issues are properly modeled, the results show that improvements in highways have no discernible impact on employment.     

Breeding Influenza: The Political Virology of Offshore Farming

Abstract:  The geographic extent, xenospecificity, and clinical course of influenza A (H5N1), the bird flu strain, suggest the virus is an excellent candidate for a pandemic infection. Much attention has been paid to the virus's virology, pathogenesis and spread. In contrast, little effort has been aimed at identifying influenza's social origins. In this article, I review H5N1's phylogeographic properties, including mechanisms for its evolving virulence. The novel contribution here is the attempt to integrate these with the political economies of agribusiness and global finance. Particular effort is made to explain why H5N1 emerged in southern China in 1997. It appears the region's reservoir of near-human-specific recombinants was subjected to a phase change in opportunity structure brought about by China's newly liberalized economy. Influenza, 200 nm long, seems able to integrate selection pressures imposed by human production across continental distances, an integration any analysis of the virus should assimilate in turn.