Priorities and Public Safety: Reentry and the Rising Costs of our Corrections System

Examines trends in the state's corrections budgets, prison population, and recidivism and the impact of the economic crisis on corrections policies nationwide. Argues for more cost-efficient evidence-based policies, with examples from other states

Strengthening Climate-Resilient Agricultural Systems in South Asia: CCAFS South Asia Regional Meeting Report

State of the art discourse on agriculture and climate change, lays emphasis on the dual role of agriculture in adapting to and mitigating climate change. Recognising the same, many countries are laying emphasis on agriculture while preparing their national adaptation plans (NAPs). In congruence with the world’s agenda to facilitate sustainable agricultural practices, while reducing poverty and hunger, CCAFS has been working for last 10 years to generate innovative solutions to promote more adaptable and resilient agriculture and food systems. South Asia regional office of Climate Change Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS) has been: generating research based knowledge, mainstreaming climate variability and climate change issues into development strategies and institutional agendas; enhancing people's understanding of climate change issues; and facilitating informed decisions on policies and actions based on the best available information and data in India, Nepal and Bangladesh, with extended research and knowledge based services extended onto Bhutan and Sri Lanka. With the vision of drawing learnings from the work done so far to elucidate the strategy of the coming years, a regional meeting titled “Strengthening Climate-Resilient Agricultural Systems in South Asia” was organised by CCAFS- South Asia in Bali- Indonesia from 6th to 7th Oct 2019. The meeting also aspired to build as well as further strengthen already existing institutional partnership. The two-day agenda included thematic sessions on topics such as developing and evaluating alternative policy and institutional models for scaling-up climate smart food system in South Asia, big-data analytics to identify and overcome scaling limitations to climate-smart agricultural practices in South Asia, capacity building for scaling up CSA via South- South collaboration among others. The meeting culminated with an agreement on the need for revisiting CCAFS research approach to build science based evidence, to facilitate formulation of better policies and programs, for a food secure world

Cyber Babel: Finding the Lingua Franca in Cybersecurity Regulation

Cybersecurity regulations have proliferated over the past few years as the significance of the threat has drawn more attention. With breaches making headlines, the public and their representatives are imposing requirements on those that hold sensitive data with renewed vigor. As high-value targets that hold large amounts of sensitive data, financial institutions are among the most heavily regulated. Regulations are necessary. However, regulations also come with costs that impact both large and small companies, their customers, and local, national, and international economies. As the regulations have proliferated so have those costs. The regulations will inevitably and justifiably diverge where different governments view the needs of their citizens differently. However, that should not prevent regulators from recognizing areas of agreement. This Note examines the regulatory regimes governing the data and cybersecurity practices of financial institutions implemented by the Securities and Exchange Commission, the New York Department of Financial Services, and the General Data Protection Regulations of the European Union to identify areas where requirements overlap, with the goal of suggesting implementations that promote consistency, clarity, and cost reduction

The European external action service: an opportunity to reconcile development and security policies or a new battleground for inter-institutional turf wars?

“There cannot be sustainable development without peace and security, and without development and poverty eradication there will be no sustainable peace”. The commitment to intertwine development and security policies of both the European Union and the Member States has increasingly been put forward in policy documents since the early 2000s. While the security-development nexus seems at first sight obvious and rather unremarkable, it has nonetheless become one of the main trouble spots of inter-institutional coherence in EU external action. The fuzzy boundaries between both policy domains and their impact on the distribution of competences turned the implementation of the nexus into a particularly complex and tense exercise. The rationale behind many of the Lisbon Treaty innovations is to address coherence issues by reducing the potential for conflict to a minimum. This paper focuses on the European External Action Service (EEAS) and analyses to what extent it could contribute to reconciling the distinct policies, strategies and institutional cultures of development cooperation and Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP). The new diplomatic service constitutes a functionally autonomous body with considerable policy discretion regarding both CFSP and development cooperation. Moreover, it assembles staff and resources from the Council, the Commission and the Member States that previously stood in sharp competition. Yet, the author argues that this integration has only been partial and without the necessary political will, the EEAS might become a new battleground for continued inter-institutional turf wars and thus undermine the EU’s international credibility

Challenges and Prospects for the EU’s Area of Freedom, Security and Justice: Recommendations to the European Commission for the Stockholm Programme. CEPS Working Document No. 313, 16 April 2009

The upcoming Swedish presidency of the EU will be in charge of adopting the next multi-annual programme on an Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (AFSJ), during its tenure in the second half of 2009. As the successor of the 2004 Hague Programme, it has already been informally baptised as the Stockholm Programme and will present the EU’s policy roadmap and legislative timetable over these policies for the next five years. It is therefore a critical time to reflect on the achievements and shortcomings affecting the role that the European Commission’s Directorate-General of Justice, Freedom and Security (DG JFS) has played during the last five years in light of the degree of policy convergence achieved so far. This Working Document aims at putting forward a set of policy recommendations for the DG JFS to take into consideration as it develops and consolidates its future policy strategies, while duly ensuring the legitimacy and credibility of the EU’s AFSJ within and outside Europe