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Little Space (little + space)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences100%

Selected Abstracts

Policy Transfer and Policy Learning: A Study of the 1991 NewZealand Health Services Taskforce

GOVERNANCE, Issue 2 2000
Kerry Jacobs
Research into policy transfer and lesson drawing has been criticized asfew authors have convincingly shown how cross-national policy learning actually influences policy formation in a particular jurisdiction. This article addresses this gap by presenting a study of the development of the 1991 health policy in New Zealand. By studying the process of policy development, rather than just a policy document, it was possible to disaggregate different aspects of the policy and to identify sources and influences. This article finds that the ,conspiracy' model of policy formation does not fit this case as it presents an overly simplistic view, which allows little space for policy learning. This case illustrates the subtle and multifaceted influence of different jurisdictions, different institutions, and different individuals on a given policy. [source]

Is There a Stabilizing Selection Around Average Fertility in Modern Human Populations?

POPULATION AND DEVELOPMENT REVIEW, Issue 3 2001
Ulrich Mueller
Possibly the greatest challenge for an evolutionary explanation of demographic transition is the fact that fertility levels universally start to fall first among the well-to-do, well-educated, healthy classes, which can be explained only by some voluntary or at least adaptive action. The problem of how restraints on fertility could have evolved by natural selection has been tackled with group selection models as well as with stabilizing selection models. The latter model, which is critically discussed in this article, posits that some intermediate (rather than maximal) level of fertility is optimal for long-term reproductive success. Tests of stabilizing selection in human populations are rare, their results inconclusive. Here four sets of data are analyzed: they are samples drawn from the 'class of 1950 of the US Military Academy at West Point (cohorts 1923,29), retired US noncommissioned officers (cohorts 1913,37), and western German and eastern German physicians (cohorts 1930,35), all containing fertility data over two generations, and from European royalty (cohorts 1790,1939) containing fertility data over four generations. Deterministic as well as stochastic fitness measures are used. It is found that maximal, not average, fertility in the first generation leads to maximal long-term reproductive success. Also against prediction, no decreasing marginal fitness gains by increasing fertility can be observed. The findings leave little space for considering stabilizing selection as a plausible mechanism explaining the course of demographic transition but indicate instead that biological evolution today is as fast and vigorous as ever in human history. Even in large populations, all people living today may be the descendants of just some few percents,a much smaller proportion than generally believed, of the people living some generations ago. [source]

The Virtue of a King and the Desire of a Woman?

ART HISTORY, Issue 2 2001
Mythological representations in the collection of Queen Christina
The centre of Queen Christina's Roman collection of paintings was the so-called ,Great Room' or ,Sala dei quadri', as described by the Swedish architect Tessin the Younger. Here the abdicated queen chose to concentrate not only the artistic highlights of her collection , such as the Madonna del Passeggio attributed to Raphael , but also the allegorical and mythological paintings by Titian, Veronese and Correggio, stemming largely from her earlier conquest of Prague. Several questions become pressing in the light of the marked dominance of female nudes among these works, questions which form the focus of this paper. Firstly, how did Christina relate to the pictorial subjects on display here? Secondly, can the paintings of a collection that served a representational function and reflected a pronouncedly personal taste also be interpreted as an expression of personal desire? The broad thematic spectrum present in the paintings in this room , encompassing female lust and chastity as well as male desire and renunciation , and one evidently brought together by Christina for programmatic effect, left little space for anything but a ,male' gaze, a sexually ambivalent notion in the light of Christina's personality. The present analysis of the Great Room and of the objects in it, including Bernini's famous allegorical mirror and an antique bronze head thought by Christina to depict Alexander, shows the room to be the bearer of a programma virtutis, one that is modelled on Christina's image in spite of its ,male' impulse. The virtus described is not that of the woman Christina, however, but of the formerly reigning Queen Christina Alexandra, whose regal self-image combined a female body private with a male body politic. [source]

Negotiating local livelihoods: Scales of conflict in the Se San River Basin

ASIA PACIFIC VIEWPOINT, Issue 1 2004
Philip Hirsch
In 1993, Vietnam began building the Yali Falls Dam 80 kilometres upstream of the point at which this westward flowing river enters Cambodia. Ninety indigenous communities along the Se San River in two provinces of north-eastern Cambodia have been impacted severely by flooding, and a dramatically altered hydrological regime that affects fisheries and all other aspects of livelihood, such as river bank agriculture. Since 2000, when the first turbines were commissioned, the affected communities have been increasingly vocal regarding the impacts of Yali and the plans for several more dams on upper reaches of the river. A complex set of actors including non-governmental organisations, village, district and provincial authorities, national committees in Cambodia and Vietnam, the Mekong River Commission and a range of international players have become involved in a two-track process, which has nevertheless allowed little space for negotiation over the Se San River on the part of those most directly affected. This case has fundamental implications for governance and conflict management in the Mekong and more widely. The Australian Mekong Resource Centre has been working with local actors to document the Se San case as part of an international project on River Basin Management: a negotiated approach, in support of six cases that involve up-scaling of grassroots river basin initiatives in Africa, Latin America and Asia. In this article, we illustrate the significance of and problematise negotiation as a socially and politically embedded conflict management principle, with reference to the Se San case. [source]