the environmental social interface of sustainable development capabilities social capital institutions the social dimension has commonly been recognised as the weakest pillar of sustainable development notably when it comes to its analytical and theoretical underpinnings while increasing attention has lately been paid to social sustainability the interaction between the environmental and the social still remains a largely uncharted terrain nevertheless one can argue that the key challenges of sustainable development reside at the interfaces synergies and trade offs between its various dimensions this paper looks for preliminary ideas on frameworks for analysing the environmental social interface it first discusses the concept of sustainable development and the relations of the three dimensions of sustainability on the basis of the fundamental premises of neoinstitutional and ecological economics and briefly presents the bioeconomy model based on this conceptualisation of sustainable development it then goes on to analyse two popular ways of addressing the social dimension of sustainability namely the capability approach of amartya sen and the concept of social capital and discusses the potential of these as bases for the analysis of the environment social interaction the organisation for economic cooperation and development oecd environmental performance review epr programme is presented as an example of attempts to analyse the environmental social interface in practice the paper concludes by noting that a single framework for studying environmental social interface is neither feasible nor desirable it questions the usefulness of analysing only two dimensions of sustainability at a time and emphasises the need to situate the analysis in its context in particular it stresses the need to involve the potential users as well as to take into account the planned use of the analysis and the interactions between different levels of analysis and decision making capabilities and social capital can both be useful in structuring thoughts but are not as such directly applicable as suitable analytical frameworks in particular they do not provide adequate tools for examining the social preconditions for institutional change needed for environmentally sustainable development

social capital in community level environmental governance a critique social capital is often claimed to facilitate collective action regarding the management of complex environmental goods and services however there is little systematic analysis in the literature that explains the way social capital aids in fostering collective action the paper integrates ideas from institutional ecological economics sociology and anthropology to argue that power relations involving struggle and resistance should be acknowledged as they affect collective action we address the question of why social capital should not be straightforwardly associated positively with common property resource management to unravel the complexity of the links between social capital collective action and common property resource management the concepts of common knowledge and symbolic power are introduced

spectrum auctions yesterday s heresy today s orthodoxy tomorrow s anachronism taking the next step to open spectrum access abstract the auction paradigm for spectrum allocation has moved from heresy to orthodoxy but like its predecessors it will not be the end of history a better alternative not driven by the revenue needs of government is license free spectrum users would gain entry to frequency bands on a pay as you go basis instead of controlling a slice of the spectrum they would transmit their content together with access tokens these tokens are electronic money access prices would vary with congestion set by automatic clearinghouses of spectrum users spot and futures markets for spectrum access would emerge once technology and economics can solve the interference problem in ways other than exclusivity the question arises whether the right to use the spectrum for electronic speech is the government s to sell in the first place

from groundless universalism to grounded generalism improving ecological economic indicators of human environmental interaction abstract ecological economics occasionally makes universal claims about how to understand and measure change in systems of human environmental interaction in terms of environmental policy one of the most influential universal concepts that has come out of the ecological economics literature recently is ecological efficiency or eco efficiency this article uses eco efficiency as a vehicle to illustrate that universal indicators of human environmental interaction are theoretically unfounded and practically problematic population ecology and neo classical economics are identified as two theoretical approaches that have contributed to the emergence of universal concepts such as eco efficiency the limited applicability of the approaches is highlighted by putting them in comparative context with approaches that make less universal claims namely systems ecology and institutional economics investigating indicators of human environmental interaction from disciplinary perspectives that are rarely found in indicator literature offers novel insights on what indicators are for and how they should be applied the article concludes with a call for scale sensitive generalization in the development of future indicators

critical natural capital a socio cultural perspective abstract critical natural capital cnc is commonly defined as that part of the natural environment which performs important and irreplaceable functions so far the challenge to determine the criticality of natural capital nc has mainly been taken up by the natural sciences and the critical functions of nature mainly associated with its life support and ecological services little attention has been paid to the socio cultural functions of nc and to their values for the health and well being of human societies the aim of this paper is to encourage a more complete accounting of the critical functions of nc and its associated values by highlighting the importance of the information functions health recreation amenity education heritage etc for the quality and sustainability of human life it is argued that despite their immaterial and often intangible nature these functions provide many socio economic benefits which might be assessed through both qualitative and quantitative valuation methodologies integration of ecology sociology and economics is essential to operationalize the concept of cnc as a tool for more balanced environmental planning and decision making

beyond environmental and ecological economics proposal for an economic sociology of the environment the vast majority of approaches in environmental economics attribute the current ecological crisis to the fact that from its inception the industrial economic system was founded on premises that made no allowance for the limits and regulatory functions of ecosystems according to these approaches we must therefore remedy the historical error of dissociating the fields of economics from the natural sciences notably by restoring the links between these two disciplines distinguishing themselves from the two historic approaches environmental economics and early ecological economics the emerging institutionalist schools evoke not only the constructed nature of the environmental crisis generally viewed as an objective fact by both traditional environmental economists and ecological economists but also the socially constructed nature of the economy and its institutions an actionalist regulationist approach allows us to formalize this twofold construction and lays the groundwork for a new economic sociology of the environment in which the technical modalities of ecological modernization are studied in light of social relations with the understanding that social relations are also affected by the materiality of the environmental crisis this actionalist regulationist approach also lends itself to anticipating likely trajectories in the future ecological modernization of economic institutions

production smoothing in the linear quadratic inventory model contrary to popular belief the linear quadratic inventory model does not imply that in response to demand shocks output is always less variable than sales when demand shocks are not anticipated and without this assumption it is hard to see why firms should hold inventories in the first place it is shown that output can be more variable than sales even when the only shocks are demand shocks and the inventory target is not a rising function of sales the variance of output will typically exceed that of sales when the firm s marginal cost curve is fairly flat copyright 1994 by royal economic society

social dilemmas and public range management in nevada abstract increasing tension in the nevada ranch community may have had a negative impact on social capital social capital is important because it facilitates cooperation in resolving social dilemmas related to public range management in this paper we use a survey of public grazing permit holders in nevada to investigate factors that affect ranchers relationships with the u s forest service and bureau of land management results indicate that contrary to expectations economic factors such as income and ranch size have little or no effect on relationships in the nevada ranch community on ranchers disagreements with public land managers and the deterioration in rancher land agency relations rather these relationships appear to be affected to a greater extent by our measures of social capital personal characteristics and experience with wildfire indeed disagreements with the public agencies were mainly affected by gender males tended to have more disagreements lack of trust and disputes concerning responses to wildfire which increased the chance of disagreement not surprisingly disagreement resulted in a deterioration of relationships that could be offset by higher levels of social capital particularly trust and positive attitudes towards the future of ranching and the community as measured by responses to a variety of attitudinal questions we conclude that while there remain opportunities to build on existing social capital in the community horizontal relations ranchers and the public agencies need to work on building vertical relations thereby increasing trust this could potentially help in the resolution of social dilemmas related to range management

the case for methodological pluralism abstract ecology and economics share the same greek root both address complex systems ecology consists of numerous approaches to understanding natural systems energetics population biology food web models hierarchy theory to mention just a few within ecology field knowledge and the reporting of new observations are well respected economics on the other hand is dominated by one pattern of thinking and standard of proof the market model and econometrics within economics field knowledge and observations per se are little valued agreement on a correct method is frequently taken as an indication of the maturity of a science the argument is developed in this paper that all the aspects of complex systems can only be understood through multiple methodologies the agreement on method within economics however seems to reflect stronger pressures within the discipline for conformity than for truth relative to ecology since ecological economics seeks to understand a larger system than either economics or ecology seeks to understand a diversity of methodologies is appropriate and pressures to eliminate methodologies for the sake of conformity should be avoided

administrative creation of property rights to radio spectrum abstract despite the 1934 communication act s ban on private ownership of radio spectrum the law leaves open to the federal communications commission a range of licensing regimes under which the commission may in its discretion grant spectrum users relatively strong or weak property rights to allotted frequencies this article examines numerous administrative decisions by the fcc to demonstrate how regulatory changes have affected the property interests conferred by spectrum licenses focusing on licensees rights to use divide and broker spectrum flexibly and to prevent unauthorized reception of their signals the article discusses the economic and legal significance of those changes and identifies areas for further reform the authors conclude that although important changes remain to be made the fcc has strengthened property interests on both the transmission and receiving ends of licensed frequencies and through the administrative process has eroded the importance of the statutory distinction

information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect commentary consider a series of companies in a supply chain each of whom orders from its immediate upstream member in this setting inbound orders from a downstream member serve as a valuable informational input to upstream production and inventory decisions this paper claims that the information transferred in the form of orders tends to be distorted and can misguide upstream members in their inventory and production decisions in particular the variance of orders may be larger than that of sales and distortion tends to increase as one moves upstream a phenomenon termed bullwhip effect this paper analyzes four sources of the bullwhip effect demand signal processing rationing game order batching and price variations actions that can be taken to mitigate the detrimental impact of this distortion are also discussed

spectrum flash dance eli noam s proposal for open access to radio waves abstract as ronald coase posited in his famous article on the nature of the firm there are situations in which decentralized markets are relatively efficient for coordinating economic activity and situations in which they are not with spectrum access assigning property rights to clearly specified private owners is the socially efficient policy because the relevant transaction efficiencies will be internalized by competitive spectrum owners selecting to what degree rights should be subdivided and in what manner marketed where spot markets are optimal an owner will maximize profits by using them where long term contracts are efficient the owner will enter profitably into them hence eli noam s solution imposing open access rules on bands of radio frequencies by government mandate is a mistaken attempt to duplicate the efficiencies of markets by mandating a particular subset of market solutions such a policy predictably will result in underutilization of the spectrum resource

integrating sustainability into city level co2 accounting social consumption pattern and income distribution abstract from a sustainability perspective city level co2 emissions require reconsiderations correspondingly the economy environment society nexus should be incorporated into city scale co2 accounting therefore in this study the semi closed io model is integrated with a hem to calculate co2 emissions arising from the social consumption pattern and income distribution and to explore economic drivers behind co2 variations this method is applied to a case study of beijing result demonstrate that beijing in 2012 witnessed something different from that in 2005 1 co2 emissions centred in the internal linkages of a broader class of consumption terms with high economic output mainly driven by interprovincial exports 2 imports increasingly helped decarbonize the mixed net forward and backward co2 linkages of consumption items and 3 income driven co2 emissions excluding demand side parts persisted which were more obvious on the supply side where households have more economy wide effects besides urban households played an essential role in household wide co2 reductions this paper ended with corresponding conclusions policy implications and directions for future work

the rationality of u s regulation of the broadcast spectrum in his classic 1983 technologies of freedom ithiel de sola pool so elucidated the prevailing wisdom concerning broadcast licensure in the united states while the key legal questions surrounding this institution involve important first amendment questions hence pool s scarcity analogy to paper ink and presses economists and other policy analysts have often remarked on the more general incongruity in federal licensing while spectrum is regulated on the physical scarcity premise it is awarded to private users on a no fee basis thus conferring significant economic rents on private parties at substantial opportunity cost to the fisc moreover federal communications commission fcc 2 policies have openly sought virtually throughout the agency s entire life span to restrict broadcast licenses and competition for broadcasters particularly cable television to far below the quantity technically available 3 the

investment in competitive equilibrium the optimality of myopic behavior there is an extensive literature on the optimal irreversible investment strategy of a solitary firm facing an exogenous price process this paper shows that the investment strategies that this literature derives may be optimal in competitive equilibrium even though the price process is now endogenous this provides a simple means for computing equilibrium investment strategies

environment justice and the capability approach in recent years several studies have attempted to combine the capabilities approach with sustainable development however critics have pointed out that although the capability approach takes the environment into account it has its shortcomings for not being a complete ethical theory our article attempts to go beyond these criticisms and show that the capabilities approach provides a good analytical framework for an environmental justice approach

sustainable development an institutional approach abstract our common future documented that the prevailing patterns of economic growth are ecologically not viable a new economic policy is likely to be needed this new policy might not be compatible with predominent neoclassical economic views the notion of sustainable development will have to be adequately incorporated into economic theory with repercussions for among other things i the treatment of natural resources as factors of production as well as welfare determinants ii valuation theory iii the evaluation of market forces the dutch abatement policy regarding acid rain is analysed in this respect it proved that the dutch government gave more attention to the growth of industrial production including the polluting ones than to sound protection of the environment it is argued that the integration of natural resources into the framework of economic theory is a prerequisite for environmental policy

comments on information distortion in a supply chain the bullwhip effect in this commentary we trace back how we pursued research on the bullwhip effect which resulted in the article published in management science we reflect on the evolution of this concept the impact that our work has had on industry the way our work has been used in the teaching of supply chain management and the key directions of research that have taken place since then

discursive synergies for a great transformation towards sustainability pragmatic contributions to a necessary dialogue between human development degrowth and buen vivir abstract there is a growing awareness that a whole societal great transformation of polanyian scale is needed to bring global developmental trajectories in line with ecological imperatives the mainstream sustainable development discourse however insists in upholding the myth of compatibility of current growth based trajectories with biophysical planetary boundaries this article explores potentially fertile complementarities among trendy discourses challenging conventional notions of un sustainable development human development degrowth and buen vivir and outlines pathways for their realization human development presents relative transformative strengths in political terms while degrowth holds keys to unlocking unsustainable material structural entrenchments of contemporary socio economic arrangements and buen vivir offers a space of cultural alterity and critique of the euro atlantic cultural constellation the weaknesses or blind spots achilles heels of each discourse can be compensated through the strengths of the other ones creating a dialogical virtuous circle that would open pathways towards a global new great transformation as one of the main existing platforms for pluralist and strong sustainability discussions ecological economics is in a privileged position to deliberately foster such strategic discursive dialogue a pathway towards such dialogue is illuminated through a model identifying and articulating key discursive docking points

implementing a market based spectrum policy abstract the spectrum auctions were a step toward the herzel coase vision of a flexible and efficient market for spectrum this article examines what remains to be done spectrum must be unbundled from broadcast and transmission facilities the commoditization of spectrum will facilitate standardization price discovery and open access to diverse users a liquid secondary spectrum market will lower transactions and entry cost making telecommunications markets contestable auctions should be used to elicit a supply of spectrum from licensees as well as to allocate it to new users in closing the spectrum commons congress granted use to a privileged few unbundled spectrum property rights commoditization and open markets will give the public access to this public resource

spectrum property law 101 abstract regulatory doctrine holds that radio spectrum licensees do not have private property rights in their licenses in fact as shelanski and huber show most of the basic attributes of private property are possessed in some measure by all licensees this practical reality has been obscured by the official ideology of public interest obligation attached to spectrum use however public interest regulation has always been marginal in practical effect but public interest ideology reinforced by interest group politics has prevented full realization of the market efficiencies that could be achieved from explicit recognition of spectrum property rights the true public interest lies in removing obstacles to efficient use of the radio spectrum and allowing it to seek its highest valued use to the public spectrum auctions may help to move us in the direction of a less burdened market system but they are only a step not the destination

to identify the critical success factors of sustainable supply chain management practices in the context of oil and gas industries ism approach abstract the concept of sustainable supply chain management sscm has been considered as an important organizational philosophy to achieve profits by reducing environmental risk and impact while improving the economic and social efficiency factors esef the objective of this paper is to present an approach to identify the critical success factors csfs of motivation and encouragement for the successful implementation of sscm practices in indian oil and gas industries 32 csfs were identified from the literature and opinions of academicians and industry practitioners the interpretive structural modeling ism methodology was used for establishing the mutual relationships among the drivers which not only helps in understanding the relative relationship between the csfs but also in determining their interdependence while implementing sustainability further the importance of csfs with respect to sustainability was identified based on their driving and dependence power by using micmac analysis global climatic pressure and ecological scarcity of resources was determined to be the most influential criterion that may force industries to implement sustainable practices an example of indian oil and gas industry has been presented to show the real world applicability of the proposed model this study may help academicians government regulators and practitioners to emphasize their efforts towards implementation of sscm at various levels of organization

property rights and wireless license values abstract while extending the scope of spectrum property rights promotes efficiency such reforms are often deterred by equity concerns theoretically however the windfalls may be negative relaxing license restrictions may increase profits by allowing enhanced productivity yet liberalization across a class of licensees can reduce the expected profits by increasing competitiveness this article examines license value changes for regimes that decisively shift toward private property rights in radio spectrum by analyzing the average prices paid in international cellular phone license auctions during 1995 2001 this unique data set encompasses 1 365 licenses assigned by competitive bidding in 38 auctions held in 24 countries licenses awarded by regimes with more expansive spectrum property rights generated winning bids that were 61 percent lower adjusting for other factors this evidence reverses the equity argument against liberalization over the policy margin studied and is consistent with coase s view

mitigating the bullwhip effect by ordering policies and forecasting methods abstract the bullwhip effect in which order variability increases as one moves up the supply chain has been observed in a range of industries modeled by several authors and various remedies suggested this paper provides a simulation of the effect of improved forecasting methods and finds that holt s and brown s methods substantially mitigate the bullwhip effect across a range of performance metrics the end result is to identify ordering policies that perform particularly well in combination with these forecasting methods and indicate how they can be implemented in practice

assigning property rights to radio spectrum users why did fcc license auctions take 67 years abstract while leo herzel 1951 and ronald coase 1959 persuasively argued for auctioning licenses issued by the federal communications commission fcc not until 1993 did the u s congress grant the fcc authority to assign wireless operating permits via competitive bidding why were auctions with obvious efficiency and equity advantages so long in coming why were comparative hearings in the public interest first abandoned as assignment tools in 1981 not for auctions but for lotteries and why were radio and tv licenses pointedly excluded from auctions four factors the special interest of regulators in influencing broadcasting content the limits placed on explicit program regulation by the u s constitution the recent increase in the relative economic importance of nonbroadcast wireless services and the agency problem embedded in central planning are used to explain both the political stability of economically inefficient licensing methods and recent reforms

the role of human and social capital in growth extending our understanding human capital institutions and social capital are now all recognised as significant factors of growth they have largely been studied separately and although they present sufficient common characteristics to be conceptualised as one main category distinct from physical capital it may still be more important to focus on the links between their specific sub categories direct links with income may be spurious as there appears to be a web of associations between the sub categories which would benefit from further empirical investigation this paper reviews the literature on human capital institutions and social capital extracting three sub categories of human capital human skills capital stock of knowledge and entrepreneurship and two of social capital low and high rationalisation specific areas are then suggested for further empirical study