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Public Process (public + process)
Selected AbstractsBuilding Material Flow Accounts in the United StatesJOURNAL OF INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY, Issue 5-6 2008A Case Study in Public Sector Innovation Summary Building a national system of material flow accounts in the United States could be an important step toward natural resource sustainability. But the task will not be as simple as "If you build it, they will come." The key to understanding the status of and prospects for official material flow accounts in the United States is to see the picture from the point of view of public sector and environmental innovation generally, rather than from the point of view of building the details of the accounts themselves. A simple model of public sector innovation helps explain what is happening and what needs to happen to make further progress. The model used here has four principal elements: methods, organizational capacity, demand, and actual use. The details and sequence of these elements vary in different situations, but all four must be present for successful innovations. Although aspects of culture, innovation, and government bureaucracy differ from country to country, the basic model appears to be similar across borders, at least in countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Seen this way, recent events in the United States indicate that (1) there is significant potential for such accounts; (2) the United States is moving toward creating them, although not in a systematic manner, which means that the progression and eventual outcome are uncertain; and (3) there are ways for the research community to participate very positively in the public process. [source] European Settlement and the Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal IdentitiesTHE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2006Francesca Merlan This paper explores variation and change in Aboriginal people's connections to places, and place-related identity, as a function of their differential historical relationship to a town. Among Aboriginal people who have lived for some decades in camps around Katherine, Northern Territory, descendants of those who appear to have the most clearly discernable long-term relationship with the area in the vicinity of the town do not relate to places, nor conceptualise them, in stereotypically ,traditional' terms. Their relationships to town and nearby places tend to be of an ideologically unelaborated, homely sort. Kinds of territorial relationships their antecedents can be shown to have had to the area have undergone dissolution. The paper seeks to develop discussion of such variation and the historical and sociological processes involved. The Katherine case brings the social and historical significance of ,towns' as sites of Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal interrelationship into focus, and also requires a critical view of notions of ,group' that have tended to dominate recent public process and understanding in Australia. [source] Community-Driven Place MakingJOURNAL OF ARCHITECTURAL EDUCATION, Issue 1 2003The Social Practice of Participatory Design in the Making of Union Point Park In neighborhoods throughout major American cities, grassroots efforts in community revitalization are reshaping the public processes and institutional framework involving the design and development of public space. Treating the public realm as both a physical space and an expression of relationships between multiple institutions, organizations, and individuals, this study examines the social and political epistemologies and processes behind the creation of a waterfront park in Oakland, California. It also presents a framework of community-driven practice in the making of the public realm, based on converging theories of social movements and planning and a critique of the current participatory design model. [source] Models, Assumptions, and Stakeholders: Planning for Water Supply Variability in the Colorado River Basin,JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN WATER RESOURCES ASSOCIATION, Issue 2 2008Dustin Garrick Abstract:, Declining reservoir storage has raised the specter of the first water shortage on the Lower Colorado River since the completion of Glen Canyon and Hoover Dams. This focusing event spurred modeling efforts to frame alternatives for managing the reservoir system during prolonged droughts. This paper addresses the management challenges that arise when using modeling tools to manage water scarcity under variable hydroclimatology, shifting use patterns, and institutional complexity. Assumptions specified in modeling simulations are an integral feature of public processes. The policymaking and management implications of assumptions are examined by analyzing four interacting sources of physical and institutional uncertainty: inflow (runoff), depletion (water use), operating rules, and initial reservoir conditions. A review of planning documents and model reports generated during two recent processes to plan for surplus and shortage in the Colorado River demonstrates that modeling tools become useful to stakeholders by clarifying the impacts of modeling assumptions at several temporal and spatial scales. A high reservoir storage-to-runoff ratio elevates the importance of assumptions regarding initial reservoir conditions over the three-year outlook used to assess the likelihood of reaching surplus and shortage triggers. An ensemble of initial condition predictions can provide more robust initial conditions estimates. This paper concludes that water managers require model outputs that encompass a full range of future potential outcomes, including best and worst cases. Further research into methods of representing and communicating about hydrologic and institutional uncertainty in model outputs will help water managers and other stakeholders to assess tradeoffs when planning for water supply variability. [source] | ||||||||||