Practical limitations in Embodied Energy and Carbon measurements, and how to address them: a UK case study

The built environment is blamed for producing the majority of carbon emissions. While policy remains focused on emissions during the operational phase, research demonstrates that embodied impacts are a significant proportion of whole life ones. This paper presents a case study of a building that integrates low-energy design features. The study was carried out during the construction phase enabling superior quality of data to be collected. The cradle-to-grave embodied impacts were modelled to the TC350 Standards using an innovative tool, and the operational impacts through simulation, incorporating future climate predictions. In spite of the data quality, the study demonstrates a high level of uncertainty due to a number of industry-wide issues. This paper identifies these issues and concludes that considerable barriers to measuring embodied impacts remain. Key recommendations are made for industry and policy, in order to gear up the measurement and reduction of embodied impacts of buildings

The devolution paradigm: theoretical critiques and the case of Kenya

Devolution’s assumptions presume democracy, yet its proponents view it as an antidote to repressive centralized states, where its assumptions do not hold. This contradiction explains why devolution mostly reproduces the status quo rather than transforming it in transition political economies. Scholars have both supported and criticized devolution, while numerous donors, civil society activists, local politicians, and ordinary citizens still view it as a solution. Disaggregating the theoretical assumptions underpinning the devolution paradigm and juxtaposing them against a case study of Kenya demonstrates how old incentives undermine new formal legal changes and why institutional change may be a dependent rather than an independent variable. Thus, a range of institutional initiatives from organizational tinkering to devolution and constitutional engineering often fail in autocracies and nominal democracies

Democratic corporate governance within fluctuating cooperative banks: A multidisciplinary diagnosis and proposition of orientations.

The democratic question became of an ardent actuality within cooperative banks since the end of the 1990's. Founding element of human-sized organizations that were the first mutual or cooperative Caisses, is democracy running the risk to dissolve by necessity in the mature and hybrid giants that are the big banking cooperative groups nowadays? The present article unveils a multidisciplinary synthesis made possible by the conjunction of three researchers studying cooperative banks through three complementary angles: law, economy and management. After a first inventory of the possible symptoms of the disappearance of democracy inherent to the cooperative project, a more differentiating diagnosis is proposed, followed by an outline of some working leads for a creative evolution of cooperative democracy.Democracy; bank;cooperative; pluridisciplinarity; new cooperative paradigm

Preserving Sacred Places: Free Exercise and Historic Preservation in the Context of Third Church of Christ, Scientist, Washington, DC

This paper will analyze the tension between the historic preservation of sacred places and the free exercise of religion as seen through the recent controversy surrounding the landmarking of Third Church of Christ, Scientist, in Washington, D.C. Assuming Third Church would bring a free exercise and RLUIPA challenge if the District denied a demolition permit, this paper will examine how such a suit would likely fail. After describing the factual background, the paper will evaluate questions of standing and ripeness. The mere fact of landmarking does not create a cause of action recognized by District of Columbia courts, so any potential suit would have to be brought after administrative remedies are exhausted. The paper will then analyze the potential challenge under pre-RLUIPA free exercise jurisprudence and conclude that despite cases to the contrary in Kansas and Washington State, the denial of a demolition permit is not a violation of free exercise under the Supreme Court\u27s analysis in Employment Division v. Smith. The paper will then address the inherent contradictions within RLUIPA when religious entities try to invoke strict scrutiny to challenge historic preservation laws. While claiming to codify existing free exercise jurisprudence and not confer immunity from land use regulations to religious entities, RLUIPA contradictorily seems to expand free exercise protections by triggering strict scrutiny review upon a showing of an individualized assessment by a government body in land use decisions

The Government of Wales Act 2006: Welsh devolution still a process and not an event?

Following the Assembly Elections in May 2007 Wales moved into a new area in its devolutionary settlement with a change of government and new legislation - the Government of Wales Act 2006. The Act is designed to revise fundamentally the Government of Wales Act 1998. Critics at the time predicted that executive devolution would be unlikely to be stable and would lead to "catch up" devolution with more privileged nations such as Scotland. Hence the second phase of Welsh devolution in which a Westminster model of Government is introduced as well as enhanced legislative powers for the National Assembly for Wales, including powers for the Assembly to be given legislative competence by Order in Council to make law in certain of the devolved fields, as an interim stage towards achieving full legislative devolution following a referendum. This paper argues that the Government of Wales Act 2006 has not conclusively settled the constitutional issues of asymmetrical devolution, such as the distribution of power between London and Cardiff; the role of the Secretary of State; the clarity and transparency of Welsh governance; and the question of how long these interim arrangements will last before Wales gains legislative devolution.</p

Undocumented Migrants as New (and Peaceful) American Revolutionaries

This essay situates undocumented migrants in the history of the American revolutionary period. The lawbreaking of both groups produced constructive legal and social change. For example, the masses of American revolutionaries and many of their leading men fought to rid the colonies of hereditary aristocracy. Colonists had come to cherish the proto-meritocracy that had bloomed on colonial shores and rankled at local evidence of aristocratic privilege, like the Crown’s grant of landed estates to absentee English aristocrats. Today’s equivalent hereditary aristocracy is the citizenry of wealthy democracies like the United States. Hereditary citizens use immigration restrictions to reserve the wealth and privilege of rich-world citizenship for themselves and invited guests. The undocumented peacefully challenge this status quo by migrating and remaining in the United States without permission, securing citizenship for their American-born children, and protesting that “no one is illegal.” In these ways the undocumented seize some of the aristocratic privileges of American citizenship and fight for others. For this and other reasons, the undocumented are contemporary heirs to the revolutionary moment—the true tea partiers of the twenty-first century

Coerced transitions in Timor-Leste and Kosovo

Statebuilding under the aegis of international administrations has faced various hurdles and obstacles in Kosovo and Timor-Leste. One of these hurdles is related to the specific mandate of these missions, which created a specific conflict of objectives for the international presence – between democracy promotion and institution-building. The piece analyzes specifically the strategies of international and local elites in this context. After trying to prioritize institution-building while paying lip service to democratization imperatives, international officials had to readjust their strategy following contestation and resistance from local partners. Facing practical consequences of the conflict of objectives, international officials then proceeded to prioritize democracy promotion imperatives and reduced their institution-building role. The paper concludes on the implications of these experiences for the debate concerning democracy promotion and highlights the possibilities of the “participatory intervention” framework put forth by Chopra and Hohe

Mechatronics &amp; the cloud

Conventionally, the engineering design process has assumed that the design team is able to exercise control over all elements of the design, either directly or indirectly in the case of sub-systems through their specifications. The introduction of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and the Internet of Things (IoT) means that a design team’s ability to have control over all elements of a system is no longer the case, particularly as the actual system configuration may well be being dynamically reconfigured in real-time according to user (and vendor) context and need. Additionally, the integration of the Internet of Things with elements of Big Data means that information becomes a commodity to be autonomously traded by and between systems, again according to context and need, all of which has implications for the privacy of system users. The paper therefore considers the relationship between mechatronics and cloud-basedtechnologies in relation to issues such as the distribution of functionality and user privacy