91,357 research outputs found
Legislative strengthening meets party support in international assistance: a closer relationship?
Recent reports recommend that international efforts to help strengthen legislatures in emerging democracies should work more closely with support for building stronger political parties and competitive party systems. This article locates the recommendations within international assistance more generally and reviews the arguments. It explores problems that must be addressed if the recommendations are to be implemented effectively. The article argues that an alternative, issue-based approach to strengthening legislatures and closer links with civil society could gain more traction. However, that is directed more centrally at promoting good governance for the purpose of furthering development than at democratisation goals sought by party aid and legislative strengtheners in the democracy assistance industry
Education policy networks in a comparative perspective: Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain and New Zealand
International initiatives in education, such as PISA and the Bologna Process, have distinctly changed conditions framing domestic policy-making. This paper sheds light on the territorial and modal dispersion of national education policy networks by means of a systematic network analytical description. The focus is on changing patterns of interactions and coalitions between international and national as well as private and public actors. Therefore, we analyse four countries, i.e. Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain and New Zealand, in a comparative perspective. The findings show that in most countries there is indeed an internationalization of education politics taking place in the sense of an increasing participation of international actors. These actors apply a more and more diversified portfolio of governance instruments. At the same time, however, domestic veto players develop a rich set of strategies to cope, compete or collaborate with international actors. -- Internationale Initiativen, wie z.B. der Bologna Prozess oder die PISA-Studien, haben die Rahmenbedingungen nationaler Bildungspolitik grundlegend verĂ€ndert. In diesem Arbeitspapier wird die Internationalisierung von Bildungspolitik aus netzwerkanalytischer Perspektive beleuchtet. Ziel ist es, den Wandel von Formen politischer Interaktion und Koalitionen zwischen internationalen und nationalen sowie privaten und öffentlichen Akteuren zu beschreiben. Dazu werden Politiknetzwerke in vier LĂ€ndern - Deutschland, Schweiz, GroĂbritannien und Neuseeland - vergleichend analysiert. Anhand der Befunde lĂ€sst sich eine Internationalisierung des Politikfelds Bildung erkennen, d.h. internationale Akteure treten im Kontext nationaler politischer Interaktion zunehmend in Erscheinung. Gleichzeitig zeigt sich, dass auch nationale Vetospieler Strategien entwickeln, um dieser neuen Konstellation in der Bildungspolitik zu begegnen.
The educational research-practice interface revisited
The question of how the realms of research and practice might successfully relate to one another is a persisting one, and especially so in education. The article takes a fresh look at this issue by using the terminology of collaboration scripts to reflect upon various forms of this relationship. Under this perspective, several approaches towards bridging the research/ practice gap are being described with regard to the type and closeness of interaction between the two realms. As different focuses and blind spots become discernible, the issue is raised concerning which 'script' might be appropriate depending upon the starting conditions of research interacting with practice
Discursive differences and policy outcomes: EU-Russia relations and security in Europe
The redefinition of political communities in Europe has been a process in flux, especially since the end of the Cold War. The central role of the EU as an âidentity builderâ (Risse, 2009) among its member states, and to a certain extent in its relations with its neighbours, has been increasingly contested, not least in its relations with Russia. Europe has been a permanent feature of Russia?s identity redefinition following the collapse of the Soviet Union and therefore a central element shaping relations between the two actors. This article puts forward the argument that differences in discourse and meanings have an impact in policy outcomes, as regards EU-Russia relations and security in Europe. It surveys fundamental events in European security and the parallel evolution in security discourses within the EU and Russia. It, therefore, maps the main elements shaping EU-Russia security relations, focusing on the construction of discursive maps and on how these have impacted bilateral and regional security relations.European Union, Russia, identity, discourse, security, neighbourhood
Opportunistic Relaying in Wireless Networks
Relay networks having source-to-destination pairs and half-duplex
relays, all operating in the same frequency band in the presence of block
fading, are analyzed. This setup has attracted significant attention and
several relaying protocols have been reported in the literature. However, most
of the proposed solutions require either centrally coordinated scheduling or
detailed channel state information (CSI) at the transmitter side. Here, an
opportunistic relaying scheme is proposed, which alleviates these limitations.
The scheme entails a two-hop communication protocol, in which sources
communicate with destinations only through half-duplex relays. The key idea is
to schedule at each hop only a subset of nodes that can benefit from
\emph{multiuser diversity}. To select the source and destination nodes for each
hop, it requires only CSI at receivers (relays for the first hop, and
destination nodes for the second hop) and an integer-value CSI feedback to the
transmitters. For the case when is large and is fixed, it is shown that
the proposed scheme achieves a system throughput of bits/s/Hz. In
contrast, the information-theoretic upper bound of bits/s/Hz
is achievable only with more demanding CSI assumptions and cooperation between
the relays. Furthermore, it is shown that, under the condition that the product
of block duration and system bandwidth scales faster than , the
achievable throughput of the proposed scheme scales as .
Notably, this is proven to be the optimal throughput scaling even if
centralized scheduling is allowed, thus proving the optimality of the proposed
scheme in the scaling law sense.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figures, To appear in IEEE Transactions on Information
Theor
EURO-MEDITERRANEAN PARTNERSHIP; STATE OF AFFAIRS AND KEY POLICY AND RESEARCH ISSUES
This study draws on a body of existing literature to take stock of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership (EMP), which focuses on establishing a Mediterranean Free Trade Area. Despite considerable scope for reducing barriers on Mediterranean trade, current agreements are limited to a quasi-unilateral reduction of trade barriers for manufactured products by the Mediterranean Partner Countries. Next to the limited scope of the current liberalisation achieved by the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, structural features of the MPCs limit the impact of the trade liberalisation on their economic growth. To promote stability and economic growth at the Southern borders of the EU, coherence of EU trade and foreign policy is called for.Agricultural and Food Policy,
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