Bosnia and Hercegovina

Bosnia-Hercegovina declared sovereignty and seceded from the residue of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRJ) in October 1991, following similar action, first by Slovenia, then by Croatia and after a plebiscite, boycotted by many ethnic Serbs, in which a majority of those voting backed independence. The following April, Bosnia-Hercegovina (BiH[a]) was recognised as a legal entity by the EU and USA. A month later it was admitted to the UN. With secession came internal conflict and external aggression, fomented by nationalists in the Croat and Muslim as well as Serb communities. The war left a quarter of a million people dead, maimed or traumatised, and the economy, infrastructure and physical and social fabric of the country in ruins. It seems fitting to dedicate this chapter to the large numbers of Bosnians (of all nationalities as well as none) who tried their utmost to prevent the war and who continue today to work for a multiethnic, democratic and environmentally healthy Bosnia. In particular, it is dedicated to those who remained in its capital Sarajevo throughout its siege by those who hoped to destroy both the city and the ideals that it represented

Yugoslavia

Present-day Yugoslavia covers the territory of what was left of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Socialistićka Federativna Republika Jugoslavija (SFRJ) following the secession, from late 1991, first of Slovenia, then, successively, of Croatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, and finally, Macedonia. This ‘rump’ - the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia Savezna Republika Jugoslavija (SRJ) consists constitutionally of two sovereign republics, Serbia and Montenegro. Each has a separate government, legal and administrative system within the Federal constitution. They are often separately represented at international fora: within SRJ their relationship is uneasy and its future uncertain. Serbia today includes the former (SFRJ) ‘autonomous provinces’ of Vojvodina to the North and Kosovo to the south. Since 1987, both were progressively assimilated - administratively and politically - into the Republic of Serbia and were formally stripped of their autonomy under a new constitution adopted by Serbia in September 1990. Both SRJ and its constituent entities have uncertain status in international law. The declaration in April 1992 by Serbia and Montenegro that SRJ was the legal successor of the SFRJ was a de facto recognition of the secession of the other four republics. However, the United Nations ruled in September of that year that this could not automatically be the case and excluded SRJ from the General Assembly; subsequently the recognition of SRJ by other nations has been uncertain. Kosovo is presently under military control of NATO (and Russian) armed forces (KFOR), its administration in the hands of a United Nations mission (UNMIK); its future can only be a matter of conjecture. Examination of environmental issues in Yugoslavia must be informed by two principal considerations: • The physical and ecological characteristics of the region, and its social and economic development up to and including the collapse of the former Yugoslavia in 1991 • Events since 1991, including socioeconomic changes, the effect of external sanctions consequent on Yugoslavia’s involvement in the civil war in neighbouring Bosnia and Hercegovina (1992-95) and, most recently, the civil war in Kosovo and the intervention of NATO. The latter, in particular, cast a shadow over any analysis of Yugoslavia and its future, including the matters dealt with in this chapter, which therefore includes an assessment of environmental damage and prospects for environmental remediation against the backcloth of an analysis of the pre-1999 situation in the region

Evaluation of the National Parks Sustainable Development Fund

The Sustainable Development Fund (SDF) is a new pilot funding stream for English National Park Authorities and the Broads Authority (henceforth collectively NPAs or ‘Parks’), launched in July 2002 by the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra). The aim is to provide a flexible and non-bureaucratic means of funding projects that “aid the achievement of National Park purposes by encouraging individuals, community groups and businesses to cooperate together to develop practical sustainable solutions to the management of their activities”. SDF is a novel and unique funding stream intended to support original and innovative projects. Although the funding is relatively small (some £2.6m or £325,000 per park over the 18 months to this report) the aim is ambitious; with a minimum of preconceptions or formalities, to “develop and test new ways of achieving a more sustainable way of living in the countryside”. In each Park, small SDF Panels, serviced by, but at arms length from, the NPA have been established to oversee delivery of the Fund, to foster innovative projects and to monitor their outcomes at Park level. The SDF Prospectus declares that monitoring and evaluation are to involve a “very light touch regime”.. Auditing of individual projects by the SDF panel is to be achieved mainly by maintaining close contact with the projects as they develop. Whilst responsibility may be delegated, panel members are encouraged to take a personal interest in projects. Each NPA is required to submit to the Minister of State for Rural Affairs (and to copy to the Countryside Agency) an annual report. This should summarise the performance of the fund against performance indicators which are to be developed by NPAs themselves in the light of experience of the fund. First Annual Reports must be submitted to the Minister of State for Rural Affairs (and copied to the Countryside Agency) at the end of March 2004 NPAs are encouraged to learn from the experience of delivering the Fund and to promote the results to a wider rural audience. In addition to this Park level monitoring, the Countryside Agency (CA) on behalf of Defra has commissioned the Centre for European Protected Area Research (CEPAR) to conduct an evaluation of how SDF has performed against its key objectives after the first eighteen months of its operation, to aid decisions about the future of the scheme from April 2005

Self-Help and the London Mechanics' Institution - Birkbeck after (George) Birkbeck

The London Mechanics’ Institute is notable not only for its place in the history of the Mechanics’ Institute movement, but also for the conflicts which surrounded its formation in 1823. The story of the eclipse of its initiators Thomas Hodgskin and J C Robertson by the liberal modernisers Brougham, Place and others is reasonably well known. Well before George Birkbeck’s own death in 1841 the battle for ‘popular control’ had largely been lost (although it continued to surface in different forms for the next century). ‘Useful knowledge’, pioneered in Birkbeck’s own early lectures in Glasgow, promoted widely in the Mechanics’ Magazine, and elevated to a social movement in Brougham’s Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, had by mid-century become almost hegemonic and was manifest in its most systematic form in William Ellis’ Birkbeck Schools, launched (not without opposition) in the summer of 1848 in the Institute’s lecture theatre. The Birkbeck Schools contributed significantly to the 1870 Education Act which through its Board Schools extended ‘workers’ education’, pioneered by the Mechanics’ Institutes, to their children. In 1851 a ‘third Birkbeck’ appeared (in addition to the Institute and the Schools) whose history to date has received little attention. By the 1850s, ‘penny savings banks’ had been set up in a number of mechanics’ institutes, however the ‘Birkbeck Bank’ was very different. An ultra vires umbrella for the Birkbeck Building Society and the Birkbeck Freehold Land Society, it became a significant constituent of the English property based financial system. Until at least 1885, the Bank had a close relationship with the London Mechanics’ Institution, sharing more than the name of George Birkbeck. The Institute and the Bank occupied joint premises, had overlapping governance and the Bank’s monies sustained the College at critical times of financial crisis. They also reflected an ideology of progressive philanthropic liberalism that was at times hotly contested by the radical champions of the social classes that both Institute and Bank had been initially formed to assist. Just as the Mechanics’ Institution was attacked from its foundation for having betrayed the ideals of its radical originators, the Birkbeck Building Society was condemned by Frederick Engels in The Housing Question (1872) for being irrelevant to the improvement of living conditions for the urban poor. The educational endeavours of Birkbeck’s Mechanics’ Institution and the financial enterprise of the Birkbeck Bank reflected parallel motivations and concealed comparable tensions. The Mechanics’ Institution embodied two distinct and contending visions of the role of working-class education within alternative political programmes of social change and political emancipation, versus individual betterment and self-realisation. The Birkbeck Bank’s initial vision of property ownership as a means of extending the franchise in order to change society gave way to one of financial prudence and owner-occupation as a route to social stability through personal fulfilment. In these conflicts between radicalism and liberal reform, the latter was, perhaps inevitably, ascendant

Ambiguity reduction by objective model selection, with an application to the costs of the EU 2030 climate targets

I estimate the cost of meeting the EU 2030 targets for greenhouse gas emission reduction, using statistical emulators of ten alternative models. Assuming a first-best policy implementation, I find that total and marginal costs are modest. The statistical emulators allow me to compute the risk premiums, which are small, because the EU is rich and the policy impact is small. The ensemble of ten models allows me to compute the ambiguity premium, which is small for the same reason. I construct a counterfactual estimate of recent emissions without the climate policy and use that to test the predictive skill of the ten models. The models that show the lowest cost of emission reduction also have the lowest skill for Europe in recent times

Birkbeck Places - landscapes of learning?

This paper explores the mutuality between the London Mechanics’ Institute (the fore-runner of Birkbeck College), the Birkbeck Schools (launched in the LMI’s Lecture Theatre in 1848) and the Birkbeck Freehold Land Society, Building Society and Bank (which between 1851 and 1885 shared the LMI’s premises and, arguably, saved it from extinction). The 1870 Education Act spelt the end for the seven Birkbeck Schools but the Bank, Land and Building Societies grew (until their collapse in 1911) to become a major constituent of the English property based financial system, playing a significant part in the transformation of London’s (sub) urban landscape. The physical apotheosis of the Birkbeck Bank was its extraordinary edifice designed by the architect of the Birkbeck Schools, T E Knightley. Erected between 1885 and 1902 on the site of the old Mechanics’ Institute, described by Pevsner as a ‘phantasmagoria’, and by the the Architectural Review as ‘the greatest single extravaganza of central London’, Birkbeck Buildings was a major commercial centre. Its dome was bigger than that of the Bank of England and adorned, as was the Bank’s façade, with symbolic bees ‘B’s and busts (including one of Birkbeck himself) signifying industry, foresight and knowledge – an iconographic paean to nineteenth century self-help. The building was replaced in 1962 with the modernist headquarters of the Westminster Bank (which took over the assets of the Birkbeck on its collapse) and what remains of ‘The Birkbeck’ (including its archives) now belongs to the Royal Bank of Scotland. The complex and problematic ideology of ‘useful knowledge’ lives on however. Its echoes can be found in the Birkbeck roads, mews, ways, places and gardens, a railway station, several pubs – and the surviving school buildings – which still feature in the landscape of London

Proofing rural lifeling learning

The countryside covers 85% of England’s land surface and the people who live and work in it comprise one fifth of the population. Yet in lifelong learning discourse, (as so often elsewhere) the countryside rarely receives much specific attention as the focus for elaboration and critique of policy. This Occasional Paper builds on a recent ‘rural proofing’ study undertaken for the Countryside Agency, which reviewed the application of government lifelong learning policies in, and their implications for, rural areas. In particular it attempted to identify and examine existing evidence for differential impacts of lifelong learning policies for rural people and businesses compared to their urban counterparts. The Countryside Agency study shows how little attention has to date been paid specifically to rural aspects of lifelong learning policy. It emphasises well known and long standing problems of access to learning opportunity, to do with inadequate and localised provision within a dispersed population, which are exacerbated by poor transport, concealed poverty (and other dimensions of social exclusion) and (for vocational training) by the specific difficulties faced by small rural enterprises. Beyond this, however, it confirms how little information exists regarding rural needs and uptake, which might allow such problems to be addressed in policy terms. It argues that existing research activities, (for example those of the Centre for the Wider benefits of Learning) should accommodate the rural dimension. In particular, local plans of the 47 regional Learning and Skills Councils (LSC) currently in production should be monitored to see to what extent they take the rural dimension into account, and how. It asserts that Non Departmental Public Bodies outside DfES (including Defra funded agencies such as the Countryside Agency) also have a role to play, in incorporating lifelong learning into their own policies (in the case of the CA especially within protected landscapes which are the focus of a number of new initiatives related to sustainable rural governance). Alongside these conclusions, however, lie other considerations. Neither lifelong learning nor rural proofing are unproblematic categories. This paper examines some of the political and ideological assumptions and constructs which underpin the categories of ‘lifelong learning’ and ‘rural proofing’. It argues that rural proofing (a government commitment to subjecting all its policies to scrutiny for rural relevance or bias) needs to reflect on its own assumptions as well as recognise contested paradigms of lifelong learning (as an umbrella term for all post school ‘adult learning’). It argues that the distinction between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ needs to be mapped onto contested paradigms of lifelong learning, and, with them, seen in an historical context. Within New Labour, lifelong learning and rural governance are both subsets of a broader agenda that has to do with entrepreneurship and competitiveness; economic well-being and environmental quality; social inclusion, citizenship, civic participation and social engagement. It concludes that the new administrative and funding structures of lifelong learning may permit a closer strategic focus on perceived regional needs, particularly those to do with skills and employment. However they are unlikely to encourage a revival and re-focusing of non-vocational (and especially non-formal) learning opportunities. Moreover to the degree that the emphasis on widening participation and social inclusion may secure access to work for some, they do little in themselves to address structural problems of rural inequality and poverty. Current instrumental trends in lifelong learning are closely focused on perceived ‘human capital’ requirements but do not necessarily take into account the specific requirements either of rural enterprises or of the diversity of rural people and their needs. Any radical developments in rural areas will need to be part of a new rural settlement in which longstanding social and economic problems of rural areas are addressed

Areas of outstanding natural beauty management plans - a guide

This is a summary of the guidance produced by the Countryside Agency to assist local authorities, AONB staff units, AONB partners and others concerned with the production and implementation of AONB Management Plans in England. A parallel text has been produced by the Countryside Council for Wales to cover Welsh AONBs. The aims of the guide are to: • assist local authorities and conservation boards to discharge their statutory functions with regard to the production of AONB Management Plans; • help ensure that Management Plans that are produced are appropriate to the needs of the AONB, have the commitment of all AONB partners1 and other stakeholders, are implemented, and their policy objectives achieved. The guide is has statutory force under the 2001 Countryside and Rights of Way Ac