Network Governance and Policy Integration—the Case of Regional Coastal Zone Planning in Norway

Integrated coastal zone management is characterized as a complex management situation, demanding integration across geographical borders, different policy sectors and levels of government. In Norway, the county municipalities are encouraged to take responsibility for achieving integration through regional coastal zone planning. Inspired by literature on network governance, the authors elaborate on how integration capacity might depend on an open and inclusive planning process and on the importance of conditions influencing the actors' perceived payoffs from participation. The result indicates that central actors benefiting from cooperation are more important in explaining the integration capacity, than the characteristics of the planning process itself. This illustrates the importance of the distribution of power and interdependencies among the actors in such processes.     

Current Research on Late Precontact Societies of the Midcontinental United States

Research during the past decade on Late Precontact societies (ca. A.D. 1000–1600/1700) in the Midcontinent, particularly Mississippian, Oneota, Fort Ancient, and Late Woodland, is strongly rooted in empirical approaches. While some of this work is pursued within a broadly evolutionary interpretive framework, other scholars emphasize agency and practice theory, symbolism, the historically contingent nature of human action, and cultural heterogeneity in sociopolitical organization, political economy, and subsistence. Dynamic models of the settlement systems and demography of complex societies have developed out of the recent growth in site inventories and refinements in ceramic chronologies and have come to be closely linked with theoretical treatments of sociopolitical organization. Various physical and chemical analytical techniques are commonly applied to the analysis of archaeological materials in this region, contributing to our understanding of direct and indirect exchange relationships and other forms of interaction, especially those between hierarchical and nonhierarchically organized societies, and enhancing our understanding of the kinds of foods prepared and eaten by people in the past.