1,720,992 research outputs found
Singing from the Same Hymn Sheet? – Examining Newspaper Coverage Bias during the 2009 MPs Expenses Scandal
No full textWe study media coverage of the 2009 MPs' expenses scandal by using a difference-in-differences methodology which is closely related to previous research on the US press of Larcinese et al. (2011) and Puglisi and Snyder (2011a). Our conclusion is that personal characteristics explain press coverage, ceteris paribus, better than partisan affiliation. In particular, we uncover a systematic unfavourable treatment of female MPs
Constructing Resilient Futures: Integrating UK multi-stakeholder transport and energy resilience for 2050
Full text linkThe 2005 terrorist attacks in London and 2007 flooding throughout the UK revealed the shortcomings of the UK Government approach of 'governing through resilience' in practice: low levels of stakeholder co-ordination, lack of understanding about critical infrastructure interdependencies, and little attention to long-term adaptation. We found that developing futures scenarios coupled with natural and malicious hazard episodes provided an effective way to draw in key stakeholders to engage with and address these problems. Starting with a detailed analysis of extant futures studies, scenarios were combined with episodes in order to both draw stakeholders out of their institutional contexts by setting the exercise in the future and to elicit participant responses during future crisis events. A procedure was developed and applied to construct integrated scenario-episodes built upon existing scenarios in order to investigate multi-stakeholder interactions around the resilience of energy and transport infrastructures. The full resulting scenario-episode narratives are also presented. These scenario-narratives were applied in key stakeholder focus groups to address the gaps in the aforementioned 'governing through resilience'. Participants actively engaged with these scenario-episodes in order to highlight overlapping conceptualisations of 'resilience', identify critical infrastructure interdependencies, and reflect deeper and more collaboratively on the longer-term resilience implications. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd
Understanding and enhancing future infrastructure resiliency: a socio‐ecological approach
Full text linkThe resilience of any system, human or natural, centres on its capacity to adapt its structure, but not necessarily its function, to a new configuration in response to long‐term socio‐ecological change. In the long term, therefore, enhancing resilience involves more than simply improving a system's ability to resist an immediate threat or to recover to a stable past state. However, despite the prevalence of adaptive notions of resilience in academic discourse, it is apparent that infrastructure planners and policies largely continue to struggle to comprehend longer‐term system adaptation in their understanding of resilience. Instead, a short‐term, stable system (STSS) perspective on resilience is prevalent. This paper seeks to identify and problematise this perspective, presenting research based on the development of a heuristic ‘scenario–episode’ tool to address, and challenge, it in the context of United Kingdom infrastructure resilience. The aim is to help resilience practitioners to understand better the capacities of future infrastructure systems to respond to natural, malicious threats.</jats:p
Post-Yugoslav Everyday Activism(s): A Different Form of Activist Citizenship?
No full textActivism is typically associated with work within charities/NGOs or participation in social movements. This essay highlights activism different from these forms in that it happens without funding or mass mobilisation. Instead, it is powered by the longer-term perspective and day-to-day efforts of ‘activist citizens’. Based on interviews and participant observation in bookshop-cafés and other donor-independent initiatives in Novi Sad, Serbia, the essay argues that such ‘everyday activism’ is significant not only because it supports the development of other, more visible, forms of activism, but also in its own right, as a counter-space contributing to social change
The imitation game: indirect European Union influence on municipal officials' attitudes towards elite corruption and informal payments
Full text linkThe European Union (EU) has sought to democratise its post-communist neighbours for the past three decades, starting with Central and Eastern Europe after 1989. Since the end of the wars in Former Yugoslavia in 2000, the EU first pursued closer integration with the Western Balkans followed by the goal of enlargement. However, despite intensive EU involvement, the fight against corruption has stagnated or deteriorated in post-communist Europe, particularly in Former Yugoslavia. The central question in the article is whether indirect EU influence has led municipal officials – who are at the front line of vital distributive decision-making for citizens at the local level – to imitate (or emulate) attitudes related to corruption and to informality in line with EU norms. The article focuses on the case of Serbia, where anti-corruption progress has been particularly slow. Using a survey of Serbian municipal officials, the article examines whether indirect EU influence via involvement in policy implementation affected attitudes towards informal payments, and through a vignette-based survey experiment, whether those involved in EU-compliant policy implementation are less accepting of local political elite corruption
Transnational consociation in Northern Ireland and in Bosnia-Hercegovina: the role of reference states in post-settlement power-sharing
Full text linkThe thesis considers ethno-territorial conflicts in which there are two conflict groups with corresponding ‘reference states’. ‘Reference states’ are internationally recognised states with co-nationals in the aforementioned disputed territory. The literature on ethno-national conflict regulation largely neglects the potential constructive role of ‘reference states’. In particular, Arend Lijphart’s work on consociational democracy focuses on elite accommodation within the conflict zone, but views other agents as ‘external’ to the dispute. Unlike most of the current ethnic conflict literature, the thesis will use a theoretical approach to derive the features of a settlement, not distil traits from purely empirical research. An informal model is employed assuming that that a military option is not open to reference states and that disengagement from the co-nationals is costly. The actions of the reference state are simplified to four options: remaining at the same level of conflict, escalating the dispute, attempting cooperation, or disengaging from the dispute. The features derived for the resulting transnational consociation settlement are: durable reference state/conational links, bipartisanship within reference states, intergovernmentalism between reference states, and consociational democracy internal to the disputed territory. The thesis then focuses on the post-conflict power-sharing settlements in Bosnia- Hercegovina and in Northern Ireland to investigate the features of transnational consociation in these two cases. The settlement after the Belfast Agreement exhibits the traits of transnational consociation, with a strong intergovernmental Dublin- London axis acting as reliable long-term guarantors of the settlement. By contrast, there is little intergovernmentalism between Zagreb and Belgrade regarding the settlement in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The post-conflict institutions are held together by international agencies that do not have as durable a link to the conflict zone as the ‘reference states’. Therefore, a durable transnational consociation with the ‘reference states’ as guarantors is more likely in Northern Ireland than in Bosnia-Hercegovina
Transnational consociation in Northern Ireland and in Bosnia-Hercegovina: the role of reference states in post-settlement power-sharing
Full text linkThe thesis considers ethno-territorial conflicts in which there are two conflict groups
with corresponding ‘reference states’. ‘Reference states’ are internationally recognised
states with co-nationals in the aforementioned disputed territory. The
literature on ethno-national conflict regulation largely neglects the potential
constructive role of ‘reference states’. In particular, Arend Lijphart’s work on
consociational democracy focuses on elite accommodation within the conflict zone,
but views other agents as ‘external’ to the dispute. Unlike most of the current ethnic
conflict literature, the thesis will use a theoretical approach to derive the features of a
settlement, not distil traits from purely empirical research. An informal model is
employed assuming that that a military option is not open to reference states and that
disengagement from the co-nationals is costly. The actions of the reference state are
simplified to four options: remaining at the same level of conflict, escalating the
dispute, attempting cooperation, or disengaging from the dispute. The features derived
for the resulting transnational consociation settlement are: durable reference state/conational
links, bipartisanship within reference states, intergovernmentalism between
reference states, and consociational democracy internal to the disputed territory. The
thesis then focuses on the post-conflict power-sharing settlements in Bosnia-
Hercegovina and in Northern Ireland to investigate the features of transnational
consociation in these two cases. The settlement after the Belfast Agreement exhibits
the traits of transnational consociation, with a strong intergovernmental Dublin-
London axis acting as reliable long-term guarantors of the settlement. By contrast,
there is little intergovernmentalism between Zagreb and Belgrade regarding the
settlement in Bosnia-Hercegovina. The post-conflict institutions are held together by
international agencies that do not have as durable a link to the conflict zone as the
‘reference states’. Therefore, a durable transnational consociation with the ‘reference
states’ as guarantors is more likely in Northern Ireland than in Bosnia-Hercegovina
Experimental investigations of biomass gasification with carbon-dioxide
No full textA sustainable energy cycle may include enhanced utilization of solar energy and atmospheric CO2 to produce biomass and enhanced utilization of exhaust CO2 from power plants for synthetic gas production. The reaction of carbon with CO2 is potentially one of the important processes in a future sustainable carbon cycle. Reactions involving carbon and CO2 are also relevant to the chemical process and metal industries. Biomass char has been recognized as a present and future alternative to fossil-fuels for energy production and fuel synthesis. Therefore, biomass char gasification with CO2 recycling is proposed as a sustainable and carbon-neutral energy technology. Biomass char is a complex porous solid and its gasification involves heat and mass transfer processes within pores of multiple sizes from nanometer to millimeter scales. These processes are coupled with heterogeneous chemistry at the internal and external surfaces. Rates for the heterogeneous carbon gasification reactions are affected by inorganic content of the char. Furthermore, pore structure of the char develops with conversion and influences apparent gasification rates. Effective modeling of the gasification reactions has relied on the best available understanding of diffusion processes and kinetic rate property constants from state of the art experiments. Improvement of the influences of inorganic composition, and process parameters, such as pressure and temperature on the gasification reaction rates has been a continuous process. Economic viability of gasification relies on use of optimum catalysts. These aspects of the current status of gasification technologies have motivated the work reported in this dissertation. The reactions between biomass chars and CO2 are investigated to determine the effects of temperature and pressure on the reaction rates for large char particles of relevance to practical gasification technologies. An experimental apparatus consisting of a high-pressure fixed-bed reactor with product gas sampling for tracking the reaction progress, supported by independent gravimetric measurements of mass loss, is described. The effects of pressure and temperature on the char-CO2 reaction are investigated at elevated pressures up to 10 atm. Measurements of reaction rates at multiple temperatures and pressures for a low-ash pinewood char are presented. Kinetic rate parameters for the char-CO2 reaction are reported with detailed uncertainty calculations and discussed in the context of the structural changes of the char with mass loss. The effects of pressure and temperature on the internal mass transfer processes and the intrinsic reaction rates are assessed using Thiele analysis for non-isothermal particles with the nth order and the Langmuir-Hinshelwood kinetic rate models. The effects of potassium, calcium and iron catalysts on the CO2 gasification rates of an activated coconut char are investigated. A catalyst treatment method for obtaining high catalyst loadings (~12 wt. %) is described. The effects of the catalysts on the surface reaction rates and the activation energies are reported. The results of this study are encouraging in the context of potential future discovery of a viable low-temperature catalytic gasification process for sustainable use of biomass as a renewable energy resource. Utilization of plant based substances such as citric acid to provide higher catalytic activity and the potential for utilizing the high initial activity of iron by using rust proofing compounds for maintaining high reactivity are recommended for further development
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