Intervention and the politics of information: US attention to foreign civil conflict

To improve scholarly understanding of the domestic drivers of third-party intervention in civil conflicts, this dissertation borrows a theoretical framework from the policy process literature. Specifically, I explain intervention through the lens of punctuated equilibrium theory (PET), a view which holds that the attention of government policymakers to most issues is persistently low but can be suddenly and dramatically mobilized. To apply this theory to the study of intervention, I collect data on US congressional speeches and US news coverage of foreign civil conflicts, 1946-1999. I then use the data to investigate the correlates of senior policymaker attention and its effects on intervention decisions. With respect to correlates, I find clear evidence that PET mechanisms motivate US congressional attention to civil conflict: I find that the distribution of change in attention to civil conflicts is leptokurtic, that civil conflicts are more likely to reach the attention of US senior policymakers if they have already reached the attention of actors lower in the policy process, and that congressional attention is subject to crowding effects. With respect to effects on policy, my findings are mixed. Congressional attention increases the likelihood of intervention when I look at all interventions but, when looking at only major interventions and controlling for prior US intervention, I find congressional attention has no statistically significant effect.Includes bibliographical references

Plantation forests, climate change and biodiversity

Nearly 4 % of the world’s forests are plantations, established to provide a variety of ecosystem services, principally timber and other wood products. In addition to such services, plantation forests provide direct and indirect benefits to biodiversity via the provision of forest habitat for a wide range of species, and by reducing negative impacts on natural forests by offsetting the need to extract resources. There is compelling evidence that climate change is directly affecting biodiversity in forests throughout the world. These impacts occur as a result of changes in temperature, rainfall, storm frequency and magnitude, fire frequency, and the frequency and magnitude of pest and disease outbreaks. However, in plantation forests it is not only the direct effects of climate change that will impact on biodiversity. Climate change will have strong indirect effects on biodiversity in plantation forests via changes in forest management actions that have been proposed to mitigate the effects of climate change on the productive capacity of plantations. These include changes in species selection (including use of species mixtures), rotation length, thinning, pruning, extraction of bioenergy feedstocks, and large scale climate change driven afforestation, reforestation, and, potentially deforestation. By bringing together the potential direct and indirect impacts of climate change we conclude that in the short to medium term changes in plantation management designed to mitigate or adapt to climate change could have a significantly greater impact on biodiversity in such plantation forests than the direct effects of climate change. Although this hypothesis remains to be formally tested, forest managers worldwide are already considering new approaches to plantation forestry in an effort to create forests that are more resilient to the effects of changing climatic conditions. Such change presents significant risks to existing biodiversity values in plantation forests, however it also provides new opportunities to improve biodiversity values within existing and new plantation forests. We conclude by suggesting future options, such as functional zoning and species mixtures applied at either the stand level or as fine-scale mosaics of single-species stands as options to improve biodiversity whilst increasing resilience to climate change