Not saying, not doing: Convergences, contingencies and causal mechanisms of state reform and decentralisation in Hollande’s France

Are States in contemporary Europe subject to new forms of convergence under the impact of economic crisis, enhanced European steering and international monitoring? Or is the evolution of governance (national and sub-national) driven fundamentally by diverging, mainly domestic pressures? Drawing on extensive new data, the article combines analysis of the State Modernisation and Decentralisation reform programmes of the Hollande–Ayrault administration, drawing comparisons where appropriate with the previous Sarkozy regime. The limits of President Hollande’s anti-Sarkozy method were demonstrated in the first 2 years; framing state reform and decentralisation in negative terms prevented the emergence of a coherent legitimising discourse. The empirical data is interpreted with reference to a comparative ‘States of Convergence’ framework, which is conceptualised as a heuristic device for analysing variation between places, countries and policy fields. The article concludes that the forces of hard convergence are gaining ground, as economic, epistemic and European pressures continually challenge the forces of institutional inertia

Engaging the user community for advancing societal applications of the surface water ocean topography mission

Scheduled for launch in 2021, the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) mission will be a truly unique mission that will provide high-temporal-frequency maps of surface water extents and elevation variations of global water bodies (lakes/reservoirs, rivers, estuaries, oceans, and sea ice) at higher spatial resolution than is available with current technologies (Biancamaria et al. 2016; Alsdorf et al. 2007). The primary instrument on SWOT is based on a Ka-band radar interferometer (KaRIN), which uses radar interferometery technology. The satellite will fly two radar antennas at either end of a 10-m (33 ft) mast, allowing it to measure the elevation of the surface along a 120-km (75 mi)-wide swath below. The availability of high-frequency and high-resolution maps of elevations and extents for surface water bodies and oceans will present unique opportunities to address numerous societally relevant challenges around the globe (Srinivasan et al. 2015). These opportunities may include such diverse and far-ranging applications as fisheries management, flood inundation mapping/risk mitigation/forecasting, wildlife conservation, global data assimilation for improving forecast of ocean tides and weather, reservoir management, climate change impacts and adaptation, and river discharge estimation, among others

A history of post-communist remembrance: from memory politics to the emergence of a field of anticommunism

This article invites the view that the Europeanization of an antitotalitarian “collective memory” of communism reveals the emergence of a field of anticommunism. This transnational field is inextricably tied to the proliferation of state-sponsored and anticommunist memory institutes across Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), but cannot be treated as epiphenomenal to their propagation. The diffusion of bodies tasked with establishing the “true” history of communism reflects, first and foremost, a shift in the region’s approach to its past, one driven by the right’s frustration over an allegedly pervasive influence of former communist cliques. Memory institutes spread as the CEE right progressively perceives their emphasis on research and public education as a safer alternative to botched lustration processes. However, the field of anticommunism extends beyond diffusion by seeking to leverage the European Union institutional apparatus to generate previously unavailable forms of symbolic capital for anticommunist narratives. This results in an entirely different challenge, which requires reconciling of disparate ideological and national interests. In this article, I illustrate some of these nationally diverse, but internationally converging, trajectories of communist extrication from the vantage point of its main exponents: the anticommunist memory entrepreneurs, who are invariably found at the helm of memory institutes. Inhabiting the space around the political, historiographic, and Eurocratic fields, anticommunist entrepreneurs weave a complex web of alliances that ultimately help produce an autonomous field of anticommunism

Space-based and in-situ observing systems for monitoring coastal zone changes of the Atlantic region

International audienc

A synthesis of the time-scale variability of commonly used climate indices using continuous wavelet transform

International audienceClimate indices are commonly used as indicators of climate variations and very often compared to those of environmental processes (geophysical, hydrological, ecological, etc.) in order to understand them in terms of regional- to global-scale fluctuations. Through their use in many research fields and published works, it appears that (sometimes not so) slight differences may exist in the identification of the characteristic time-scales governing the temporal variations of those indices from one work to another, and one eventually may experience difficulties in finding a "unified" referencing of these typical scales of variability. For this purpose, we propose a synthetic description and quantification of the time-scale variability of some of the most commonly used climate indices: the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the Northern Annular Mode (NAM), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and the Pacific-North-America teleconnection (PNA); which was performed using a single unified methodology, i.e. continuous wavelet analysis, adapted to the study of stochastic processes that exhibit time-varying statistical characteristics. Each climate index presents its own characteristic time-scales, from inter-annual to multi-decadal scales. However, some energy bands present common characteristics in terms of frequency (or time-scale) ranges and/or temporal occurrence, from inter-annual scale (a group of 2-4 y, 3-6 y and 4-8 y fluctuations), to (pluri-)decadal scale (a group of 5-12 y, 8-16 y, 12-20 y and 17-30 y fluctuations) and in the long term (a group of 20-50 y, 40-60 y and 50-80 y fluctuations). Moreover, a common structuration for all climate indices seems to appear in the form of an inter-annual scale structuration in 1930, and a global shift in the frequency structuration of all climate indices in 1970 affecting decadal and pluri-decadal scales. Analysis of the distribution of the total variance of climate indices over time highlights different periods of high/low variability according to each index. However, a common distribution could also be observed for all climate indices, suggesting a more or less "connected" evolution (i.e. shared by all indices) of the total variance over time. At a global scale (i.e. averaging of the AMO, PDO, SOI and NAO), evolution of the total variance was evaluated for the 1900-2009 period and indicates the same periods of high/low variability: the 1930-1960 and 1980-2000 periods correspond to the periods of maximum variance, with maxima observed around 1940 and in particular in 1990; and the 1960-1980 period corresponds to a period of lower variance, centered around 1970. These 1970's changes, both in the total variance (which marks a notable increase of total variability) and in frequency changes observed in all climate indices, definitely constitute a major and global shift in the climate system observed in several other indicators over the world