Suchergebnisse

As state governments increasingly turn to the process of quantitative risk assessment to set environmental policy, the question of what state lawmakers know and believe about risk and the risk assessment process has become critical. The perceptions of state legislators may affect their decisions about a wide range of environmental conflicts, from funding water treatment facilities to siting hazardous waste incinerators. This article reports the results of a nationwide survey of state legislators and their staff that explored their intuitive understanding of environmental risk and risk assessment. The survey revealed strong support for the use of risk assessment by most state lawmakers, but significant differences, by gender and political affiliation, in perceptions of the risks from chemicals, the value of risk assessment for setting environmental policies, and the environmental risks faced by racial minorities.

Public practices for the suppression of witchcraft are periodically performed throughout Sub-Saharan Africa. Anthropologists have generally sought to interpret such practices rather than explain them. This interpretation rests on assumptions about what such practices might mean for social actors rather than on the actual social processes which make their public performance possible. In the anthropological view, the performance of anti-witchcraft practices amounts to an expression of discontent with aspects of social and economic life deriving from the terms of Africa's engagement with the contemporary world. Antiwitchcraft practices and the witchcraft discourse of which they are part are understood to constitute locally constructed critiques of social transformation and modernity. But, whatever the coherence of the symbolic logic expressed in anti-witchcraft practices, such accounts fail to explain why large numbers of people participate in such practices from time to time or how such practices become public.

This book is the result the first Vavilov-Frankel fellowship that was awarded in 1993. The Vavilov-Frankel Fellowships programme was established by the Bioversity Board of Trustees in 1989 to commemorate the unique contributions to plant science by academician Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov of Russia and Sir Otto Frankel of Australia. The first two fellowships examined the historical background of the plant genetic resources movement and produced two books: the present one and the one by Igor Loskutov, Vavilov and his institute: a history of the world collection of plant genetic resources in Russia.

An analysis is made of the interaction between the legislature and the judiciary in the Dutch parliamentary setting, focusing in particular on the issue of euthanasia. Using the methodology of positive political theory, two alternative hypotheses are derived about the extent to which the courts may affect public policies. Two main conclusions can be drawn from the analysis of the decision-making process on euthanasia. First, the statutory interpretation the courts gave on euthanasia in the 1980s supports the hypothesis of the court as a policy advocate, not a policy conserver. Secondly, the fact that the courts were able to introduce and maintain a more liberal interpretation of euthanasia during the last decade can be explained as a consequence of the heterogenous preferences on this issue held by the political parties that formed the successive governing coalitions. (British Journal of Political Science / FUB)