Global public-private partnerships : different perspectives

Global public-private partnerships are part of the global governance framework and influence our daily lives - yet our understanding of them is incomplete. Research has attributed the existence of these partnerships between state, market and civil society actors variously to the influence of leaders, new management ideas, resource deficits and the proliferation of issues beyond the ability of any single sector to manage. Yet explorations of these themes primarily focuses on the United Nations core agencies, and overlooks the technical international government organizations; organizations which facilitate a multitude of transactions in various policy areas between nation-states, their agencies and administrations. Personal experience with such an organization - Interpol - indicated the answer to the puzzle was incomplete. Therefore, this study was undertaken to further explore the question of why international government organizations participate in global public-private partnerships. Using case studies, this research set out to discover a better explanation for the phenomena of global public-private partnerships. Research was conducted with the International Telecommunication Union, the International Criminal Police Organization and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property. Between them, they represented a diverse section of international policy fields - communication; police cooperation and cultural conservation. This research found that beyond the themes in the literature, global public-private partnerships are shaped by the dominant professional culture of an international government organization, and the organizational culture also uniquely inherent in each. The use of theories of professional and organizational culture has therefore filled a gap in our knowledge about this global phenomenon. Furthermore, these cultural factors also influence how the other factors are perceived and then acted upon. The end results are partnerships that comfortably fit with the beliefs, values, norms and assumptions common the respective professional and organizational culture

Further Defining Spectral Type "Y" and Exploring the Low-mass End of the Field Brown Dwarf Mass Function

We present the discovery of another seven Y dwarfs from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Using these objects, as well as the first six WISE Y dwarf discoveries from Cushing et al., we further explore the transition between spectral types T and Y. We find that the T/Y boundary roughly coincides with the spot where the J-H colors of brown dwarfs, as predicted by models, turn back to the red. Moreover, we use preliminary trigonometric parallax measurements to show that the T/Y boundary may also correspond to the point at which the absolute H (1.6 um) and W2 (4.6 um) magnitudes plummet. We use these discoveries and their preliminary distances to place them in the larger context of the Solar Neighborhood. We present a table that updates the entire stellar and substellar constituency within 8 parsecs of the Sun, and we show that the current census has hydrogen-burning stars outnumbering brown dwarfs by roughly a factor of six. This factor will decrease with time as more brown dwarfs are identified within this volume, but unless there is a vast reservoir of cold brown dwarfs invisible to WISE, the final space density of brown dwarfs is still expected to fall well below that of stars. We also use these new Y dwarf discoveries, along with newly discovered T dwarfs from WISE, to investigate the field substellar mass function. We find that the overall space density of late-T and early-Y dwarfs matches that from simulations describing the mass function as a power law with slope -0.5 < alpha < 0.0; however, a power-law may provide a poor fit to the observed object counts as a function of spectral type because there are tantalizing hints that the number of brown dwarfs continues to rise from late-T to early-Y. More detailed monitoring and characterization of these Y dwarfs, along with dedicated searches aimed at identifying more examples, are certainly required.Comment: 91 pages, 15 figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journa