A multi-agent simulation model for spatial optimisation of manure allocation

Edition

Volume 53, Issue 8 December 2010 , pages 1011 - 10

ISBN/ISSN

09640568

Collation

-

Series Title

Journal of Environmental Planning and Management

Call Number

-

Valuing lagoons using a meta-analytical approach: methodological and practica…

Lagoons are naturally complex ecosystems whose dynamics are strongly influenced by anthropic factors. Therefore, their value depends not only on their characteristics but also on the nature of the interactions, whether positive or negative, between mankind and nature. Starting from a representative set of 31 original studies exclusively devoted to coastal lagoons valuation, we estimate a meta-a…

The greening of Chicago: environmental leaders and organisational learning in…

Urban sustainability literature calls for new governance relations to support green urban agendas. Privileging non-hierarchical relations, this literature fails to address the means by which organisations create these capacities. The author interviewed public, private and community environmental leaders in metropolitan Chicago regarding their disposition toward creating boundary spanning organi…

An economic and environmental assessment of carbon capture and storage (CCS) …

In the not too distant future several power plants throughout Europe will have to be replaced and the decision has to be made whether to build coal-fired power plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS). In a study for the city of Kiel in northern Germany only an 800 MW coal power plant reaches a required minimum for rentability. This study looks at an additional economic and environmental ev…

Rule Following and Discretion at Government's Frontlines: Continuity and Chan…

As important players in the policy process, many studies have investigated the determinants of bureaucratic behavior. One intriguing set of findings suggests that behavior is linked to bureaucrats’ views of themselves as government officials and their views of the people who they serve. Despite the importance of workers’ perceptions, we have little understanding about how bureaucrats develop ps…

Working with the State: Exploring Interagency Collaboration within a Federali…

In an era of devolution, collaboration between state and local institutions could be an effective tool for state governments to capitalize on local knowledge and respect local autonomy, while maintaining consistent standards and enforcement. However, the benefits to local agencies are less clear. Local agency personnel may have goals that diverge from their state counterparts and significant co…

Customer, Partner, Principal: Local Government Perspectives on State Agency P…

Public agencies increasingly perform their functions in partnership with other public, nonprofit, and private sector actors, prompting growing research interest in how these collaborations function. As yet, almost no one has thought it worth asking how collaborative partners perceive each other's performance, although these perceptions may themselves constitute important measures of agency effe…

Personnel Flexibility and Red Tape in Public and Nonprofit Organizations: Dis…

Academics and journalists have depicted government bureaucracies as particularly subject to administrative constraints, including the infamous red tape and personnel rules that sharply constrain pay, promotion, and dismissal and weaken their relations to performance. Research on these topics has often focused on public organizations alone or on comparisons of public and private organizations. T…

Administrative Exclusion: Organizations and the Hidden Costs of Welfare Claiming

Organizations operate as the gateway to public benefits. They are formally authorized to adjudicate claims, in the process interpreting and applying eligibility rules. Beyond their designated role, they also operate as informal gatekeepers, developing modes of operation that affect the ease or difficulty of claiming. Operational practices—both formally prescribed and informally created—can add …

The Big Question for Performance Management: Why Do Managers Use Performance …

This article proposes that understanding public employee use of performance information is perhaps the most pressing challenge for scholarship on performance management. Governments have devoted extraordinary effort in creating performance data, wagering that it will be used to improve governance, but there is much we do not know about the factors associated with the use of that information. Th…

What Drives the Implementation of Diversity Management Programs? Evidence fro…

As the diversity of the US workforce continues to increase at a rapid pace, public managers are facing pressure to create organizational cultures that permit employees from different backgrounds to succeed. A typical managerial response to this diversity has been the implementation of a formal diversity management program. Although limited empirical research has considered links between diversi…

Science Starts Not after Measurement, but with Measurement

Federal statistics should be viewed and treated as part of the nation’s scientific infrastructure. The empirical social sciences dependent on those statistics produce social knowledge directly relevant to social problem analysis and policy formation. Statistics primarily come from the census and federal sample surveys, but increasing use is made of administrative and digital data. These two dat…

Federal Statistics in the Policy making Process

Federal statistics are integral to the adequate evaluation of public policy planning and performance in the United States. The Obama administration has determined that empirical science, including statistics, will be at the foundation of the president’s policy agenda. However, to be useful, federal statistics must be reliable, relevant, timely, and unbiased, and the departments that produce the…

The Government Accountability Office and Congressional Uses of Federal Statis…

This article examines the ways in which the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) provides the U.S. Congress with information that is timely, objective, fact-based, nonpartisan, nonideological, fair, and balanced. It shows how over many decades, GAO’s work has led to laws that have improved government operations and saved the government and the taxpayers billions of dollars. The article r…

Designing a New Architecture for the U.S. National Accounts

The key elements of a new architecture for the U.S. national accounts have been developed in a prototype system constructed by Dale W. Jorgenson and J. Steven Landefeld, director of the Bureau of Economic Analysis at the U.S. Department of Commerce. As the U.S. economy emerges from the most severe contraction since the Second World War, the focus of policy will shift toward enhancing the econom…

The Federal Statistical System: The Local Government Perspective

Federal data are crucial to state and local governments, enabling them to assess the level of need in a community, to establish appropriate funding levels for programs, and to implement programs in a cost-effective manner. This article first demonstrates how data from the decennial census and American Community Survey have been used by a local government—New York City’s—to identify and target t…

Indicators and the Federal Statistical System: An Essential but Fraught Partn…

An indicator can be defined as a statistic used as part of an assessment exercise. There have been three relatively distinct waves of interest in indicators at the national level. Indicator work creates both opportunities and hazards for federal statistical agencies. Indicators not only increase the accessibility of federal statistics but also expose statistical agencies to charges of partisans…

Immigration Statistics for the Twenty-First Century

Of the three main contributors to population growth— fertility, mortality, and net migration—the latter is by far the most difficult to capture statistically. This article discusses the main sources of federal statistical data on immigration, each with its own characteristic set of strengths, weaknesses, possibilities, and limitations in the context of the interested social scientist. Among the…

Why American Families Need the Census

This article examines how family researchers use federal statistics, particularly from the U.S. Census, to understand the realities of trends concerning the family unit. The article shows that these data have helped researchers to understand the major, largely irreversible revolution that has taken place in America in the ways that people engage in family formation, make interpersonal commitmen…

The Census and the Federal Statistical System: Historical Perspectives

This article provides an overview of one major platform of the federal statistical system, the census. It briefly describes the origin and structure of the current diverse and decentralized federal statistical system and then describes the place of the census and the Census Bureau in the system. It treats the census in the context of the demographic and political history of the nation and discu…