Water and democracy: new roles for civil society in water governance

In most democratic countries, government officials make water-allocation decisions. Citizens depend on these officials and their technical advisors to take account of both technical and political considerations in determining which water uses get priority, what infrastructure investments to make and what water quality standards to apply. In many parts of the world, water users and stakeholders have additional opportunities to comment on such decisions before they are implemented. Under some circumstances, citizens can challenge water management decisions in court. This is not enough. More direct democracy, involving stakeholders before such decisions are made, can produce fairer and increasingly sustainable results. The steps in collaborative adaptive management – a form of stakeholder engagement particularly appropriate to managing complex water networks – are described in this article along with the reasons that traditional forms of representative democracy are inadequate when it comes to water policy

Open Cosmic Strings in Black Hole Space-Times

We construct open cosmic string solutions in Schwarzschild black hole and non-dilatonic black p-brane backgrounds. These strings can be thought to stretch between two D-branes or between a D-brane and the horizon in curved space-time. We study small fluctuations around these solutions and discuss their basic properties.Comment: 11 pages, REVTex, 5 figures, a reference adde

Exponentially Small Supersymmetry Breaking from Extra Dimensions

The supersymmetric ``shining'' of free massive chiral superfields in extra dimensions from a distant source brane can trigger exponentially small supersymmetry breaking on our brane of order e^{-2 pi R}, where R is the radius of the extra dimensions. This supersymmetry breaking can be transmitted to the superpartners in a number of ways, for instance by gravity or via the standard model gauge interactions. The radius R can easily be stabilized at a size O(10) larger that the fundamental scale. The models are extremely simple, relying only on free, classical bulk dynamics to solve the hierarchy problem.Comment: RevTex, 1 figure. Comment on mu problem adde

Vacuum Energy Cancellation in a Non-supersymmetric String

We present a nonsupersymmetric orbifold of type II string theory and show that it has vanishing cosmological constant at the one and two loop level. We argue heuristically that the cancellation persists at higher loops.Comment: 31 pages harvmac big, 6 figures. New version includes the 2-loop analysis of hep-th/9810129 and elimination of one of the two heuristic arguments for higher loop cancellatio

On the Taxonomy of Flux Vacua

We investigate several predictions about the properties of IIB flux vacua on Calabi-Yau orientifolds, by constructing and characterizing a very large set of vacua in a specific example, an orientifold of the Calabi-Yau hypersurface in $WP^{4}_{1,1,1,1,4}$. We find support for the prediction of Ashok and Douglas that the density of vacua on moduli space is governed by ${\rm det}(-R - \omega)$ where $R$ and $\omega$ are curvature and K\"ahler forms on the moduli space. The conifold point $\psi=1$ on moduli space therefore serves as an attractor, with a significant fraction of the flux vacua contained in a small neighborhood surrounding $\psi=1$. We also study the functional dependence of the number of flux vacua on the D3 charge in the fluxes, finding simple power law growth.Comment: 22 pages, harvmac; v2 typos corrected, refs added; v3 minor error correcte

Light-like Big Bang singularities in string and matrix theories

Important open questions in cosmology require a better understanding of the Big Bang singularity. In string and matrix theories, light-like analogues of cosmological singularities (singular plane wave backgrounds) turn out to be particularly tractable. We give a status report on the current understanding of such light-like Big Bang models, presenting both solved and open problems.Comment: 20 pages, invited review for Class. Quant. Grav; v3: section 2.3 shortened, discussion on DLCQ added in section 3.1, published versio

The Politics of Environmental Dispute Resolution

Also PCMA Working Paper #17.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/51148/1/380.pd