Advantages of a Polycentric Approach to Climate Change Policy

Lack of progress in global climate negotiations has led scholars to reconsider polycentric approaches to climate policy. Several examples of subglobal mechanisms to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions have been touted, but it remains unclear why they might achieve better climate outcomes than global negotiations alone. Decades of work conducted by researchers associated with the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University have emphasized two chief advantages of polycentric approaches over monocentric ones: they provide more opportunities for experimentation and learning to improve policies over time, and they increase communications and interactions — formal and informal, bilateral and multilateral — among parties to help build the mutual trust needed for increased cooperation. A wealth of theoretical, empirical and experimental evidence supports the polycentric approach

Incomplete Punishment Networks in Public Goods Games: Experimental Evidence

Abundant evidence suggests that high levels of contributions to public goods can be sustained through self-governed monitoring and sanctioning. This experimental study investigates the effectiveness of decentralized sanctioning institutions in alternative punishment networks. Our results show that the structure of punishment network significantly affects allocations to the public good. In addition, we observe that network configurations are more important than punishment capacities for the levels of public good provision, imposed sanctions and economic efficiency. Lastly, we show that targeted revenge is a major driver of anti-social punishment

Protocols for Assessing Transformation Rates of Nitrous Oxide in the Water Column

Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a potent greenhouse gas and an ozone destroying substance. Yet, clear step-by-step protocols to measure N2O transformation rates in freshwater and marine environments are still lacking, challenging inter-comparability efforts. Here we present detailed protocols currently used by leading experts in the field to measure water-column N2O production and consumption rates in both marine and other aquatic environments. We present example 15N-tracer incubation experiments in marine environments as well as templates to calculate both N2O production and consumption rates. We discuss important considerations and recommendations regarding (1) precautions to prevent oxygen (O2) contamination during low-oxygen and anoxic incubations, (2) preferred bottles and stoppers, (3) procedures for 15N-tracer addition, and (4) the choice of a fixative. We finally discuss data reporting and archiving. We expect these protocols will make 15N-labeled N2O transformation rate measurements more accessible to the wider community and facilitate future inter-comparison between different laboratories

Stratigraphy of Lake Vida, Antarctica: hydrologic implications of 27 m of ice

Lake Vida, located in Victoria Valley, is one of the largest lakes in the McMurdo dry valleys and is known to contain hypersaline liquid brine sealed below 16 m of freshwater ice. For the first time, Lake Vida was drilled to a depth of 27 m. Below 21 m the ice is marked by well-sorted sand layers up to 20 cm thick within a matrix of salty ice. From ice chemistry, isotopic composition of δ18O and δ2H, and ground penetrating radar profiles, we conclude that the entire 27 m of ice formed from surface runoff and the sediment layers represent the accumulation of surface deposits. Radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating limit the maximum age of the lower ice to 6300 14C yr BP. As the ice cover ablated downwards during periods of low surface inflow, progressive accumulation of sediment layers insulated and preserved the ice and brine beneath, analogous to the processes that preserve shallow ground ice. The repetition of these sediment layers reveals hydrologic variability in Victoria Valley during the mid- to late Holocene. Lake Vida is an exemplar site for understanding the preservation of subsurface brine, ice, and sediment in a cold desert environment

Social Mpower: An Educational Game for Energy Efficiency

A number of serious games have been developed for energy systems that act as an educational tool and help energy consumers to better understand concepts such as resource allocation, electricity prices and grid sustainability. In such gamified environments, players use technology to solve environmental problems including greener environment, optimised energy and water infrastructure, sustainable resources and reduced energy use. Social Mpower game is a representation of an autonomous energy community for local power generation and distribution in which the participants have to avoid a collective blackout by individually reducing their energy consumption by synchronising and coordinating their actions. Our experimental hypothesis is that collective awareness can be enhanced by appropriate features of the game interface, and therefore to increase the opportunities and prospects for successful collective action (e.g to avoid a blackout)

Historical-institutionalist perspectives on the development of the EU budget system

The EU budget has only recently started to feature in theories of European integration. Studies typically adopt a historical-institutionalist framework, exploring notions such as path dependency. They have, however, generally been rather aggregated, or coarse-grained, in their approach. The EU budget has thus been treated as a single entity rather than a series of inter-linked institutions. This paper seeks to address these lacunae by adopting a fine-grained approach. This enables us to emphasize the connections that exist between EU budgetary institutions, in both time and space. We show that the initial set of budgetary institutions was unable, over time, to achieve consistently their treaty-based objectives. In response, rather than reform these institutions at potentially high political cost, additional institutions were layered on top of the extant structures. We thus demonstrate how some EU budgetary institutions have remained unchanged, whilst others have been added or changed over time