Suchergebnisse

Book review of Religion in the Classroom: Dilemmas for Democratic Education (2015), by Jennifer Hauver James.

Conventional state policies for intensive agricultural production in the Vietnamese Mekong Delta (VMD) prescribe the expansion of large-scale water engineering infrastructure. In the upper part of the VMD, compounding environmental challenges presented by climate change, hydropower development upstream, and localised development policies have added greater pressures to rural societies, demanding various governance approaches to deal with change. So far, considerable attention has been devoted to policy narratives of how the bureaucratic approach shapes flood management delta-wide, but little is known about the relevant shift towards adaptive governance at the local level. The analysis presented here is based on qualitative data gathered from fieldworks and desk reviews and argues that the North Vam Nao scheme is an exemplary case for policy transformation in the VMD. A hybrid governance paradigm that is characterised by the participatory and hierarchical approaches allows for the shared learning and interactions of knowledge vertically and horizontally among stakeholders. The study presents nuanced implications of the approach in incorporating both 'integrative' and 'adaptive' components into a long-term water governance strategy, which would serve as a two-pronged contribution to effectively manage environmental uncertainties facing the VMD. It also advocates for the legitimacy of the approach to be institutionalised and widely adopted across the Mekong floodplains and beyond. ; This publication partly benefited from the financial support of a Singapore Ministry of Education's Social Science Research Council (SSRC) grant entitled "Sustainable Governance of the Transboundary Environmental Commons in Southeast Asia" (MOE2016-SSRTG-068). The authors gratefully acknowledge key respondents for providing information in this study.

AbstractWe investigate whether diversification affects bank risk taking in the U.S. banking industry, and whether this relation is partially explained by agency theory. Our results show that U.S. banks with a relatively high share of noninterest income become riskier when moving toward non‐interest‐income‐generating activities, especially activities from investment banking, proprietary trading, and so on. Diversification not only affects conditional average risk, but also the dispersion of risk. Moreover, diversified banks that received assistance from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) become riskier than diversified nonrecipients after TARP capital injections. Our main findings are robust to a battery of robustness tests. The results are partially explained under agency frameworks related to poor corporate governance.