The European Union and policy coherence for development: reforms, results, resistance

This article discusses the trajectory of policy coherence for development (PCD) in the European Union (EU). In particular, it argues that the strong focus on institutional mechanisms, conceived as a way of overcoming different types of resistance, has had the effect that results achieved have by no means been commensurate with the expectations raised by the various reforms launched over the years. EU Member States have paid lip service to the importance of PCD without translating commitments into more coherent (national and supranational) policies. Moroever, an analysis of the Impact Assessment (IA) – one of the key mechanisms to promote PCD at EU level – prepared for the reform of the EU’s agricultural and fisheries policies in 2011–2013 shows how bureaucratic arrangements have substantially failed to clarify the real impact of EU policies on (different types of) developing countries. The conclusion is that successful promotion of PCD is more than just having the right arguments and ensuring sufficient technical support, but is first and foremost a political undertaking

Ambition with credibility: explaining (variation of) EU effectiveness in international development negotiations

This article analyses the role played by the European Union (EU) in the changing development architecture, focusing on the negotiation and conclusion of four high-level forums on aid effectiveness, held in Rome (2003), Paris (2005), Accra (2008) and Busan (2011). Drawing on published and unpublished material and 32 interviews with senior officials involved in these international negotiations, it reaches two main conclusions. First, EU internal effectiveness does not always translate into EU external effectiveness: it some cases, in fact, it may even be counterproductive. Second, to explain the EU’s ability to have an impact in multilateral negotiations, it is necessary to take into account the quality of the message (i.e. level of EU ambitions vis-à-vis other negotiators) and the quality of the messenger (i.e. degree of EU credibility, again in relation to other negotiators)

Democratic sultanate, atomised pluralism, political engineering: Sartori and the paradoxes of the Italian political system

No abstract available

Multiscale fluid--particle thermal interaction in isotropic turbulence

We use direct numerical simulations to investigate the interaction between the temperature field of a fluid and the temperature of small particles suspended in the flow, employing both one and two-way thermal coupling, in a statistically stationary, isotropic turbulent flow. Using statistical analysis, we investigate this variegated interaction at the different scales of the flow. We find that the variance of the fluid temperature gradients decreases as the thermal response time of the suspended particles is increased. The probability density function (PDF) of the fluid temperature gradients scales with its variance, while the PDF of the rate of change of the particle temperature, whose variance is associated with the thermal dissipation due to the particles, does not scale in such a self-similar way. The modification of the fluid temperature field due to the particles is examined by computing the particle concentration and particle heat fluxes conditioned on the magnitude of the local fluid temperature gradient. These statistics highlight that the particles cluster on the fluid temperature fronts, and the important role played by the alignments of the particle velocity and the local fluid temperature gradient. The temperature structure functions, which characterize the temperature fluctuations across the scales of the flow, clearly show that the fluctuations of the fluid temperature increments are monotonically suppressed in the two-way coupled regime as the particle thermal response time is increased. Thermal caustics dominate the particle temperature increments at small scales, that is, particles that come into contact are likely to have very large differences in their temperature. This is caused by the nonlocal thermal dynamics of the particles..

Make Europe happen on the ground? Enabling and constraining factors for EU aid coordination in Africa

This article investigates the extent to which collective commitments donor coordination made at the EU level trigger changes in the practices of EU member states. By exploring the trajectory of joint programming from its inception in Europe to its application in sub-Saharan Africa, it demonstrates that member states’ development policies are affected by EU membership, but to differing degrees. Importantly, the transformative power of Europe is less pronounced on the ground than at headquarters level. This decoupling of norms from practices can be attributed not only to the attempt of EU donors to pursue national goals and to the resistance of aid bureaucracies, but also to the increased scepticism of recipient countries and the growing complexity of the development architecture

Particle motion and gradient dynamics in turbulent flows: Theory and Numerical Simulations

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Application of the nonuniform fast Fourier transform to the direct numerical simulation of two-way coupled particle laden flows

We present the application of the Nonuniform Fast Fourier Transform (NUFFT) to the pseudo-spectral Eulerian–Lagrangian direct numerical simulation of particle-laden flows. In the two-way coupling regime, when the particle feedback on the flow is taken into account, a spectral method requires not only the interpolation of the flow fields at particle positions, but also the Fourier representation of the particle back-reaction on the flow fields on a regular grid. Even though the direct B-spline interpolation is a well-established tool, to the best of our knowledge the reverse projection scheme has never been used, replaced by less accurate linear reverse interpolation or Gaussian regularization. We propose to compute the particle momentum and temperature feedback on the flow by means of the forward NUFFT, while the backward NUFFT is used to perform the B-spline interpolation. Since the backward and forward transformations are symmetric and the (non local) convolution computed in physical space is removed in Fourier space, this procedure satisfies all constraints for a consistent interpolation scheme, and allows an efficient implementation of high-order interpolations. The resulting method is applied to the direct numerical simulation of a forced and isotropic turbulent flow with different particle Stokes numbers in the two-way coupling regime. A marked multifractal scaling is observed in the particle statistics, which implies that the feedback from the particles on the fields is far from being analytic and therefore only high-order methods, like the one here proposed, can provide an accurate representation

Reverse shoulder prosthesis in patients with rheumatoid arthritis: a systematic review

PURPOSE: To obtain detailed information on the outcomes of patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) undergoing reverse shoulder arthroplasty (RSA) METHODS: A literature search was conducted for studies reporting on the use of RSA in RA patients from 1990 to 2014. The inclusion criteria were a report of sufficient information on pre-operative status and surgical outcome allowing evaluation of the therapeutic potential of RSA in RA. The literature search resulted in 586 hits, but only five studies that met the inclusion criteria were assessed. RESULTS: There were 100 shoulders that had been operated on, of which 87 were followed for a mean of 55.4 months, the longest follow-up being 11.9 years Most patients had glenohumeral erosive lesions of Larsen Grade III or IV. The Delta III prosthesis was implanted in most cases and in three studies bone graft was used for severe glenoid lesions. The main outcome measures employed were the Constant score (Cs) and ASES questionnaire. The mean increase in Cs and ASES score after surgery was 42.4 and 54 points, respectively. The mean post-operative forward elevation was 120.6°, the average increment being 51° and the mean increase of abduction was 58.5°. The mean prevalence of scapular notching was 35.4 %. The rate of adverse events was 31 %, but the vast majority were of minor severity. Eight prostheses underwent revision, due to infection in four. CONCLUSIONS: RSA implanted in RA patients would appear to give similar results to those obtained in massive cuff tears with or without arthropathy

The Non Uniform Adaptive Angular Spectrum Method and its Application to Neural Network Assisted Coherent Beam Combining

Increasing the number of laser beams that can be coherently combined requires accurate and fast algorithms for compensating phase and alignment errors. The paper proposes to use a Fully Connected Artificial Neural Network (FCANN) to correct the beam positioning perturbations by evaluating the beam shifts and tilts from two images taken at slightly different locations. Then, since it is practically impossible to have a large enough experimental dataset to train the neural network, this approach required developing an accurate and fast simulation method to evaluate the beam propagation in arbitrary directions, overcoming the limitations occurring when the computation must be repeated a large number of times. The numerical approach is a variant of the Angular Spectrum (AS) method, called Non Uniform ADaptive Angular Spectrum (NUADAS) method, which relies on the combination of non-uniform and adaptive Fourier transform algorithms to allow the computation of an arbitrary field distribution in a plane that is shifted and tilted with respect to the source. The parallel implementation of the NUADAS method is discussed and the numerical and experimental validations are presented. Then, an FCANN is trained using the synthetic dataset generated with the NUADAS method and the results are discussed, demonstrating the viability of the proposed approach not only for coherent beam combing, but also in other beam alignment applications

Purposefully triggering unintended consequences: the European Commission and the uncertain future of the EU-ACP partnership

The EU’s proposal to renew the EU-ACP Agreement in spite of a number of signals pointing in the opposite direction is, inter alia, the unintended consequence of independent decisions taken in three different policy areas (trade, environment, and foreign and security affairs). The common unintended consequence that the three decisions shared would not have materialised if the European Commission had not purposefully triggered it to justify its vision of future EU-ACP relations. These findings challenge the prevailing and superficial usage of the notion of the unintended as a synonym for unanticipated and undesirable, and demonstrate that unintended consequences do not necessarily presuppose lack of anticipation, but may well be the result of calculation by policymakers