Property Rights for Biodiversity Conservation and Development: Extractive Reserves in the Brazilian Amazon

Many of the world's most valuable biodiverse areas are successfully managed by indigenous communities, often under peculiar property rights structures. In many cases, these communities are economically disadvantaged, even by local standards. But can particular local property rights regimes which are ecologically successful also allow communities to compete productively in market economies? The extractive reserves of the Brazilian Amazon offer an opportunity for investigating the connections between property rights, conservation and development in the context of tropical forests. This article aims to analyse whether the existing property rights in these reserves — an idiosyncratic mixture of public, collective and private property rights — can support the explicit development aim of a competitive, yet sustainable, exploitation of the area's natural resources. The analysis identifies three promising development paths open to extractive reserves, but points to a fundamental contradiction between the static structure of the property rights system and the dynamic nature of two of these paths. The current design of internal property rights fails to take into account the broader economic context in which reserves must generate a viable revenue stream. If extractive reserves are expected to develop without reliance on external aid, then changes to the property rights structure both inside and outside the extractive reserves have to be explicitly considered.     

A threat like no other threat,George Berkeley against the freethinkers

In this paper, our purpose is to show what George Berkeley really said about ethics and the background conditions of religious life. The point is that true happiness is only possible in a religious sense; it means happiness in afterlife. The major threat to this is freethinking, or what we see as emerging enlightened modernism. His rather quixotic fix against freethinking shows the man as he is behind all the conventional panegyrics. He is a real Anglican soldier who anticipated but never admitted a critical defeat in the most important of all battles. Interest in George Berkeley’s life’s work has been exceptionally selective. Yet his revolutionary immaterialism is only an early episode in his struggles towards a better society and religious life for all the people, regardless of their denomination. From this point of view, Alciphron is central. But he also develops his ethical ideas in his various minor writings, which have been largely overlooked.     

IN SEARCH FOR THE ROOTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONCERN

Contrary to widespread conception, environmental issues were commonly debated in public already over a hundred years ago. Based on an extensive newspaper study this paper concentrates on water management and animal welfare issues in the local newspapers in the city of Turku, Finland, in 1890–1950. At the time, the role of the newspapers was important in shaping public understanding of environmental issues. Although the amount of environment‐related writing remained scarce in comparison to today's media, the debate was continuous and sometimes even fierce. Both environmental protection and animal welfare received very positive comments in the press and they were considered important aims. The discussion reflected the opinions of the middle‐class and especially the well‐educated professionals and officials, whose views dominated the debate. However, animal protection also gave women a possibility to get their voice heard. Ordinary newspaper‐reading city dwellers must have been well aware of the local environmental problems already in the early 20th century.     

Kant on Hobbes,peace, and obedience

Kant's essay ‘On the common saying: “This may be true in theory, but it does not apply in practice”’ contains a chapter ‘On the relationship of theory to practice in political right’ to which he added, in brackets, ‘(Against Hobbes)’. The problem is that Kant leaves his Hobbes-criticism implicit. The main point seems to be the Hobbes's citizens are without any rights. We explore the differences and similarities between Kant's and Hobbes's political views and evaluate the effectiveness of Kant's criticism. We pay attention to Nominalism and Platonism, the idea of happiness in social life, the use and role of the Golden Rule (Categorical Imperative) in political thought, the quest for freedom, and the principle of political non-resistance. Especially freedom of speech is important for Kant as an Enlightenment thinker. This is the only right Kant's citizens may have, independently of the sovereign's will. Our conclusion is that both Kant and Hobbes emphasize peace and order under sovereign power although they do not agree on how such an ideal can be achieved.     

Regional clusters in Germany--their geography and their relevance for entrepreneurial activities

The aim of this paper is to identify regions with industrial clusters in Germany and to analyse their entrepreneurial environment. A new index employing industry data supplied from the German Federal Labour Office is used to elaborate on spatial clusters in the most concentrated German industries. A second data set collected as part of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), serves to assess the relationship between regional clusters and entrepreneurial activities and attitudes. The paper tests the rather popular but hitherto seldomly empirically-proven hypothesis that the existence of one or several industrial cluster(s) in a region has a positive impact on the number of start-ups and attitudes in the very same region. The implications of the findings with respect to regional policies encouraging industrial clusters are discussed briefly in the concluding section.     

The Language of Postwar Intellectual Schmittianism

The article analyzes the work of Hanno Kesting, Reinhart Koselleck, Roman Schnur, and Nicolaus Sombart—four young followers of Carl Schmitt in postwar Germany. Their “intellectual Schmittianism” was less than a full commitment to Schmitt’s political positions, yet had more than an arbitrary similarity with them: it pertained to assumptions, categories, and modes of thought. Drawing on Pocock’s terminology, I identify a particular “language” of intellectual Schmittianism, introduce its key components, and analyze their interaction. I focus on six categories derived from Schmitt’s narrative of European political modernity: discrimination, historical parallels, secularization, global civil war, open/latent civil war, and category blurs. The analysis shows that these categories were interlinked argumentative devices rather than mere rhetoric and that they systematically upheld the postwar scholars’ arguments. While the Schmittian language enabled the young scholars to express their political skepticism without necessarily rejecting the newly adopted institutional forms, it also constrained their choices. Linguistic resources can always be used for novel purposes, yet the dense internal structure of the language of postwar intellectual Schmittianism hindered revaluation and selective utilization. Kesting excluded, the young scholars gradually grew critical of Schmitt to varying degrees, but they never directly confronted his problematic language.     

Spelling correctness as a witness of changing documentary culture in Tuscia (eighth–ninth centuries)

This paper discusses the evolution of documentary culture in early medieval Tuscia by quantitatively examining the Latin spelling of charter scribes in relation to the following factors: time, the distinction between the formulaic and non-formulaic parts of the document, the scribe’s domicile, the scribe’s professional status, and the document type. The paper asks what the spelling of charters tells us about administrative and socio-cultural changes in charter production and in scribal education. The research data is 997 charters from the Late Latin Charter Treebank, and the approach that of philological corpus linguistics.     

Impacts of urban living labs on sustainability transitions: mechanisms and strategies for systemic change through experimentation

ABSTRACT

Urban Living Labs (ULL) are considered spaces to facilitate experimentation about sustainability solutions. ULL represent sites that allow different urban actors to design, test and learn from socio-technical innovations. However, despite their recent proliferation in the European policy sphere, the underlying processes through which ULL might be able to generate and diffuse new socio-technical configurations beyond their immediate boundaries have been largely disregarded and it remains to be examined how they contribute to urban sustainability transitions. With this study, we contribute to a better understanding of the diffusion mechanisms and strategies through which ULL (seek to) create a wider impact using the conceptual lens of transition studies. The mechanisms of diffusion are investigated in four distinct ULL in Rotterdam, the Netherlands and Malmö, Sweden. The empirical results indicate six specific strategies that aim to support the diffusion of innovations and know-how developed within ULL to a broader context: transformative place-making, activating network partners, replication of lab structure, education and training, stimulating entrepreneurial growth and narratives of impact.     

DETERMINANTS OF IMMIGRANTS’ ENTRY TO HOMEOWNERSHIP IN THREE NORDIC CAPITAL CITY REGIONS

The extent of homeownership among immigrants may be seen as an indicator of integration and as a determinant of ethnic residential segregation. Studies have shown differences in the determinants of homeownership between immigrants and natives, indicating that variation in homeownership is not only a function of differences in economic resources. These studies have largely focused on Anglo‐American contexts, using mostly cross‐sectional data. We apply survival analysis methods to analyse the determinants of entry to homeownership in the capital regions of three Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland and Sweden – utilizing longitudinal individual‐level register‐based datasets. We find that differences in entry to homeownership between natives and different immigrant groups cannot be explained by differences in socio‐economic background factors. We also find differences in the effects of these factors. Effects of income are generally weaker among non‐Western immigrants and immigrants are less responsive to changes in household composition. The share of non‐Western immigrants in the neighbourhood is only weakly related to entry to homeownership, while immigrants and natives living in public rental housing tend to be slightly less inclined to move to homeownership. Weaker income effects among immigrants, weak effects of ethnic segregation and the importance of the public rental sector differentiate our results from earlier findings. Weaker income effects may indicate that uncertainty about the future also affects middle‐income immigrants. Differences between the three contexts in housing markets and policies do not seem to matter much, although the results indicate that difficult access to the private rental sector may push immigrants to homeownership.