Voluntary Environmental Governance Arrangements

Voluntary environmental governance arrangements have focal attention in studies on environmental policy, regulation and governance. The four major debates in the contemporary literature on voluntary environmental governance arrangements are studied. The literature falls short of sufficiently specifying whether or not voluntary environmental governance arrangements are successful in addressing environmental risks. This is due to the narrow focus of many contemporary studies and a tendency to study the form and content of voluntary environmental governance arrangements in isolation from their contextual settings. In order to gain a better understanding of voluntary environmental governance arrangements, scholars are challenged to study differently structured voluntary environmental governance arrangements in different contextual settings, to move beyond single country or single voluntary environmental governance arrangements studies, and to combine quantitative and qualitative data in studying these arrangements

Different but equally plausible narratives of policy transformation: A plea for theoretical pluralism

Theories of institutional change help us to understand policy transformation, and provide us with a framework for presenting transformation narratives retrospectively. By telling the transformation narrative of a single case through the lenses of three different institutional change theories, this article highlights the potential shortcomings of a single lens, and the value of using complementary lenses. It argues for a pluralist approach to provide a richer understanding of policy transformation

Smart Privatization: Lessons from Private Sector Involvement in Australian and Canadian Building Regulatory Enforcement Regimes

Various scholars stress that traditional regulatory regimes will benefit from greater private sector involvement. There has been little empirical study, however, on the impact of the "amount" of privatization on certain policy goals. This paper aims at filling that knowledge gap. Based on an analysis of private sector involvement in the enforcement of Australian and Canadian building codes, it argues that a certain threshold exists after which more privatization no longer results in effectiveness and efficiency gains. It furthermore discovers that the relationship between the public and private sector within a regime matters in reaching certain policy goals

Experimentation in policy design: Insights from the building sector

The current article questions how experimentation in policy design plays out in practice. In particular, it is interested in understanding how the content and process of policy-design experiments affect their outcomes. The article does so by building on an original study into 31 real-world examples of experimentation in policy design in the building sector in Australia, the Netherlands, and the United States. All examples aim to improve the environmental sustainability of the building sector. The article finds that these 31 examples have attracted moderate to substantial numbers of participants (policy outcome HO.i), but have not achieved substantial numbers of buildings built or retrofitted with high levels of sustainability (policy outcome HO.ii). By carefully unpacking these policy designs into a number of key characteristics, it finds that this mismatch between the two outcomes may partly be explained by flawed policy-design processes. The article concludes with the main lessons learnt and provides some suggestions on how to improve experimentation in policy design

Is New Governance the Silver Bullet? Insights from the Australian Buildings Sector

New governance is gaining momentum in the addressing of environmental risks. It is often expected that new governance arrangements will achieve higher levels of effectiveness than traditional forms of environmental policy. The current research questions

Analysing divergent logistic networks with local (R, S) inventory control

This paper deals with divergent logistic networks where the inventory at each node is controlled using a periodic review strategy with order-up-to level. An approximate method is presented to analyse the network performance (service levels, mean physical stock). The method is tested on a range of 2-echelon and 3-echelon networks by comparison to results from Monte Carlo simulation. We conclude that the approximation accuracy is sufficient for global network design in many practical situation

Edge and Line Feature Extraction Based on Covariance Models

age segmentation based on contour extraction usually involves three stages of image operations: feature extraction, edge detection and edge linking. This paper is devoted to the first stage: a method to design feature extractors used to detect edges from noisy and/or blurred images. The method relies on a model that describes the existence of image discontinuities (e.g. edges) in terms of covariance functions. The feature extractor transforms the input image into a “log-likelihood ratio” image. Such an image is a good starting point of the edge detection stage since it represents a balanced trade-off between signal-to-noise ratio and the ability to resolve detailed structures. For 1-D signals, the performance of the edge detector based on this feature extractor is quantitatively assessed by the so called “average risk measure”. The results are compared with the performances of 1-D edge detectors known from literature. Generalizations to 2-D operators are given. Applications on real world images are presented showing the capability of the covariance model to build edge and line feature extractors. Finally it is shown that the covariance model can be coupled to a MRF-model of edge configurations so as to arrive at a maximum a posteriori estimate of the edges or lines in the image

Consistency checks for particle filters

An "inconsistent" particle filter produces - in a statistical sense - larger estimation errors than predicted by the model on which the filter is based. Two test variables are introduced that allow the detection of inconsistent behavior. The statistical properties of the variables are analyzed. Experiments confirm their suitability for inconsistency detection