A stakeholders-oriented approach to analyze the case of the UNESCO’s man and biosphere reserve CollinaPo

The paper investigates the combined use of storytelling and the Simos-Roy-Figueira (SRF) method to support the identification of the most important decision criteria in a decision process concerning a valorization strategy for a UNESCO’s MaB reserve. The approach is illustrated with an Italian case study (“CollinaPo”), describing one of the four focus groups where it has been applied, as part of a training course to discover and valorize the values and peculiarities of the area. The choice of a combination of storytelling and SRF has been also induced by the very varied composition of the workshop participants: the two methods are intuitive and entertaining, the latter in particular allows to select and weight the criteria on a subjective scale that stimulate the stakeholders’ acceptance. The fact that several common criteria arose across of different groups despite the limited time and the variety of the participants, seemed a positive indicator of the goodness of the choice. The participants pointed out this sense of “belonging” to UNESCO’s MaB reserve “CollinaPo” beyond the division into individual municipalities, expressing a clear vision of the need to act as a “network” on the territory to reinforce the attractiveness of the area. Even if the article illustrates the results of a single case, it incorporates a series of reasoning related to three workshops already done in the same project, and other applications are scheduled

Industrial Clusters in Russia: The Development of Special Economic Zones and Industrial Parks

This paper investigates the process of developing and implementing special economic zones (SEZs) and industrial parks in Russia. Governments commonly use SEZ policies to develop and diversify exports, create jobs and launch technology/knowledge sharing. The industrial cluster concept is based on the significance of rivalry and supplier networks within the cluster, the combination of geographical specificities and government policies that lead to innovation and productivity growth. This study reveals that in Russia the government′s approach in developing these initiatives has strongly interfered with business activities and prevented the vital competitive and collaborative behavior of firms within these economic zones

Modelling environmental adjustments of production technologies: A literature review: Externalities and environmental studies

This chapter theoretically discusses existing methodologies to model environmental adjustments of technologies. We elaborate on the limitations of treating pollution as an input or weakly disposable output, as commonly occurs in the literature. Moreover, we discuss the drawbacks of models that rely on the materials balance principle. We advocate the use of multi-equation modelling, which explicitly models the subprocesses of the production technology. Applied to the context of pollution, such an approach separately models the conventional technology, on the one hand, and the pollution-generating technology, on the other. Finally, we discuss abatement options as well as the possibility of adjusting for good environmental outputs (e.g. carbon sinks).</p