Restoration dialogues: improving the governance of ecological restoration

Ecological restoration activities should be conceptualized as a form of governance, as this lens best captures the multiactor, collaborative processes by which societies through governments and nonstate entities seek to achieve environmental outcomes. Successful restoration governance depends on addressing a cluster of challenges concerning optimal spatiotemporal scales, biological feasibility, sociocultural acceptability, financial viability, and institutional tractability. Changes to private law, company law, and taxation are some of the governance reforms available to tackle these challenges.     

End‐of‐life product management as a resilience driver for developing countries: A policy experiment for used tires in Ecuador

Over the last decades, a number of new environmental policies have been designed to improve waste management. Among them, extended producer responsibility (EPR) has introduced a mechanism to shift the environmental and financial burden of end‐of‐life products from public management to producers. Recently, EPR has been adopted by a growing number of developing countries, but this policy often struggles in being effectively implemented in such contexts, missing the opportunity of using waste management as a sustainability driver. By discussing the EPR for end‐of‐life tires (ELTs) in Ecuador, this paper proposes a different approach in designing and implementing EPR schemes in developing countries: it recommends consideration of social sustainability, rather than merely copying foreign management frameworks. To address this point, two case studies on socially directed ELT applications were designed and carried out. The case studies aimed at improving resilience of vulnerable populations to natural disasters by increasing the resistance of housing and settlements against catastrophic events using civil engineering applications. The analysis of the case studies’ outcomes brings to light possible policy adjustments, in which social sustainability goals are taken into account within the national EPR scheme. The Ecuadorian case also highlights the benefit of employing an adaptive governance approach when dealing with challenging urban management topics, such as informality (a widespread phenomenon in developing countries) and resilience.     

Beyond Tropical Forests Adoption: Contextualizing Conservation Strategies

The complexity of factors driving tropical deforestation demand integrated approaches from concerned researchers and policy makers. Strict protection is sometimes the most appropriate mode of conservation, but conservation through management is often the better option. In either case, this essay highlights the importance of considering the social/cultural, economic, and political contexts in which these forests are threatened. By attempting to understand the cultural settings, institutional architectures and dynamics, and local expectations, and then by combining the concepts and tools of a range of disciplines, researchers will be more likely to forge lasting partnerships and increase their potential for sustained improvement in resource management and overall forest conservation.     

医疗卫生领域社会治理理论研究及应用概述

社会治理是基于对本社会管理过程中权力格局分析与判断,在政府、市场、社会与公民基关系明确定位的前提下倡导的新型公共管理模式,由于其对公众利益和责任表达、解决突出社会矛盾问题具有针对性和优越性,已得到普遍促进和应用。试图通过对国内外社会治理理论进展、内涵归纳以及医疗卫生领域社会治理有效路径和实践探索的梳理分析,提出了在医疗卫生领域探讨和开发其社会治理效用和适宜路径的思考建议。     

Lucent Industrial Ecology Faculty Fellowship Program

In this report, we review the Lucent Foundation-funded Industrial Ecology Fellowship Program for the 1992-I997 period and summarize the program genesis and history. During that period, 33 fellowships were awarded. This article gives a complete listing of funded faculty fellows and their research topics, which range from physical science and engineering to economics, public policy, and law. We assess the program impacts and present an objective evaluation of the widespread influence and consequences of Lucent Foundation support of the emerging paradigm of industrial ecology. In addition, we discuss future directions for the field and emphasize the significance of total quality management concepts in the reduction of industrial ecology principles to practice.     

Proposing an indicator framework for FLEGT voluntary partnership agreements impact monitoring

In 2003, the European Union (EU) launched the Action Plan for Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT). The Action Plan aims to combat illegalities in the forest sector, using trade as the leverage to involve producers, traders and consumers in its implementation. A key instrument emerging from the Action Plan is Voluntary Partnership Agreements (VPAs). These are bilateral trade agreements between the EU and wood exporting countries, to ensure that all wood exports were produced and traded in accordance with the laws of the originating country. Six such agreements were negotiated so far and with their implementation nearing, it is important to develop methodology for monitoring key impacts of a VPA. The VPAs and the Action Plan specifically outline the requirement to monitor their impacts on the livelihoods of forest dependent communities. For this an effective VPA impact monitoring system has to be built that fits with the context and capacity of the country. This paper aims to contribute to these developments by proposing an indicator framework for a country-level VPA impact monitoring. The framework comprises of 46 indicators designed to capture changes across ten key impact areas of VPAs. The paper also discusses requirements and possible challenges of VPA impact monitoring as well as its implications to good forest governance in the VPA countries and offers principles for cost-effective VPA impact monitoring.     

医疗机构混合所有制的浙江实践与启示

医疗机构混合所有制是当前热点之一。文章通过对混合所有制及混合所有制医院概念与内涵的阐述,提出了混合所有制在医疗卫生领域的实现形式,并从理论上分析其可能对医院产生的影响。同时,以浙江Z医院为例,通过其改制前后变化和同地区规模最大、综合实力最强的R医院作了对比分析,发现其在社会效益、成本效率、服务质量和治理结构方面均取得了成功。最后,剖析了混合所有制改革能够在医疗卫生领域取得成功的原因,从而得出结论：医疗机构混合所有制改革应坚持公益性,建立科学的法人治理结构和良好的制度保障。     

Governing stem cell therapy in India: regulatory vacuum or jurisdictional ambiguity?

Stem cell treatments are being offered in Indian clinics although preclinical evidence of their efficacy and safety is lacking. This is attributed to a governance vacuum created by the lack of legally binding research guidelines. By contrast, this paper highlights jurisdictional ambiguities arising from trying to regulate stem cell therapy under the auspices of research guidelines when treatments are offered in a private market disconnected from clinical trials. While statutory laws have been strengthened in 2014, prospects for their implementation remain weak, given embedded challenges of putting healthcare laws and professional codes into practice. Finally, attending to the capacities of consumer law and civil society activism to remedy the problem of unregulated treatments, the paper finds that the very definition of a governance vacuum needs to be reframed to clarify whose rights to health care are threatened by the proliferation of commercial treatments and individualized negligence-based remedies for grievances.     

Variable conceptions of population in community resource genetic projects: a challenge for governance

In recent years, human genetic research has developed rapidly, and the cost of sequencing and computational technology continues to decline. This research has also been pushed forward by a major organizational innovation: the development of large, open-access databases of human gene sequences or biospecimens known as community resource projects. This article describes a challenge for the governance of these projects: conceptions of population vary significantly across organizational contexts. This makes it difficult to manage risk appropriately, as measures intended to address hazards to one kind of population may be inadequate for others. Unstable conceptions of population may also make it difficult to identify the stakeholders interested in the governance of these projects. This argument is developed by examining two cases, the International HapMap Project and 1000 Genomes Project, which make use of at least six distinct conceptions of population in different organizational segments.     

Insights on the Use of Hybrid Life Cycle Assessment for Environmental Footprinting

Establishing a comprehensive environmental footprint that indicates resource use and environmental release hotspots in both direct and indirect operations can help companies formulate impact reduction strategies as part of overall sustainability efforts. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful approach for achieving these objectives. For most companies, financial data are more readily available than material and energy quantities, which suggests a hybrid LCA approach that emphasizes use of economic input‐output (EIO) LCA and process‐based energy and material flow models to frame and develop life cycle emission inventories resulting from company activities. We apply a hybrid LCA framework to an inland marine transportation company that transports bulk commodities within the United States. The analysis focuses on global warming potential, acidification, particulate matter emissions, eutrophication, ozone depletion, and water use. The results show that emissions of greenhouse gases, sulfur, and particulate matter are mainly from direct activities but that supply chain impacts are also significant, particularly in terms of water use. Hotspots were identified in the production, distribution, and use of fuel; the manufacturing, maintenance, and repair of boats and barges; food production; personnel air transport; and solid waste disposal. Results from the case study demonstrate that the aforementioned footprinting framework can provide a sufficiently reliable and comprehensive baseline for a company to formulate, measure, and monitor its efforts to reduce environmental impacts from internal and supply chain operations.