Technology Evolution and Citizen Activism: The Net and the Rebirth of Limited Government

Stuart Nagel's scholarship often focused on how technology shaped policy. This link constantly evolves as political activists seek new advantages. The Internet has greatly altered today's activism by sharply reducing information costs. This transformation is well illustrated in school politics and tax avoidance. Disgruntled parents no longer need to fight the education establishment directly—non-public school alternatives such as home schooling are now far easier thanks to the Net. The Net has also greatly facilitated tax avoidance by "democratizing" offshore banking. These options now constrain Washington and thus restore a degree of limited government once almost unthinkable.     

Memorial to Stuart S. Nagel

The following memorials to Stuart Nagel attempt to recount his life and works and place these in context. As will be shown, he was highly productive and has left a legacy in policy studies, public administration, public laws, and a number of other areas that is extraordinarily impressive.     

The uncertain state of islands: national identity and the discourse of islands in nineteenth-century Britain and Greece

This paper explores some of the ways in which the island was mapped into the British and Greek national imaginaries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From at least the seventeenth century the island, like the body, served as a model for the organisation of knowledge. The island functioned as an ideal body politic, in which political and cultural boundaries were congruent and readily defensible from invasion. In politically and geographically fragmented states the island became an important topos for resolving the problematic relations between nation and state, and between local knowledge and national unity. During the nineteenth century, national cultures were increasingly construed as autonomous, self-sustaining island spaces set apart from other communities beyond. From the second half of the century attention was also paid to those authentic ‘islands’ located within the nation-state. In this expanded topographical definition, the ‘island’ came to signify an identifiably different, contained and stable habitat. A relationship was sustained between these distinct spaces within the nation-state and the island as it was represented in biogeographical and evolutionary writings as a site for observing preserved life forms and diversification. Regional studies, for example, celebrated the survival of an indigenous national culture in geographically confined pockets. Emerging disciplines, such as folklore, sought to protect these spaces from the onslaught of a cosmopolitan modernity that threatened to overwhelm them. The island in this sense was a space in which ‘native’ customs might be preserved and, at the same time, a space in which potentially destructive, atavistic forces might be controlled and ultimately domesticated. It is here that the island emerges as an ambivalent, problematic place: at once a refuge and a prison, a place of innocent childhood adventure and of beastly aggression. Focusing on Britain and Greece as comparative case studies, the paper explores how this concern for internal ‘islands’ fed into and was reciprocally influenced by colonial encounters with ‘exotic’ island cultures.     

Vulnerability to climate change hazards and risks: crop and flood insurance

This paper reviews the widely used concepts of risk and vulnerability as they relate to climate and weather hazards, re‐conceptualizes these terms in the context of climate change and illustrates this development using crop and flood insurance as examples. Government subsidization of insurance against risks associated with adverse climatic conditions and weather events, such as flood damage and crop loss, may lead to individual decisions that actually increase the susceptibility of people, property and economic activities to those risks. The processes that give rise to this phenomenon are important in understanding the vulnerability of human populations to climate change. In many regions, existing conditions that give rise to flooding or crop failure are likely to be exacerbated by climate change over coming decades. In the climate change field, vulnerability has been conceptualised as a function of exposure to risk and as an ability to adapt to the effects. In this context, crop and flood insurance are possible adaptive measures. This treatment of vulnerability compares with similar concepts in insurance and risk management whereby events that cause loss are known as perils, and physical conditions, such as climate change, that increase the likelihood of a peril occurring, are known as physical hazards. Human behaviour that increases the exposure of individuals to potential perils is known as morale hazard or moral hazard, depending on the intentions of the person. Vulnerability consequently becomes a function of hazard and responses taken to reduce risk. Examples of crop and flood insurance programs from Canada, New Zealand and the U.S. are used to show how subsidized insurance might create a morale hazard in addition to physical hazards such as short‐term weather events and long‐term climate change, resulting in a higher level of vulnerability than would otherwise exist. These findings demonstrate that human behaviour affects the formation of both exposure and adaptive capacity in the context of vulnerability to climate change. Responses taken to increase adaptive capacity may in some cases be offset by individual behaviour that increases exposure.     

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.     

Integrating shallow geophysical survey: archaeological investigations at Totógal in the Sierra de los Tuxtlas,Veracruz, México

The Postclassic site of Totógal in the western Tuxtla Mountains of Veracruz, Mexico contains rare examples of stone architectural features in the southern Gulf Lowlands. Today, the partial remains of one such structure are highly visible; however, the amount of wall fall, looters' pit destruction and over-growth masks the extent and form of the feature. Local histories ascribe these ruins to early Colonial construction periods, however Postclassic Aztec-style artifacts recovered near this architecture question the occupational sequence of the site and its constructions. To better examine the extent of construction, as well as the occupation associated with them, we conducted a program of shovel testing, topographic mapping, electromagnetic induction survey and excavation. We discuss our findings in this paper and demonstrate the utility of geophysical surveys as complementary field strategies in the Tuxtla Mountains and other volcanic regions.     

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.