Brexit and devolution

A report on debates about Brexit in relation to devolution and the relationships between the 'UK' government and Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland

Post-exceptional politics in agriculture: an examination of the 2013 CAP reform

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. A core claim about agricultural policy making is that it is ‘compartmentalized’ and ‘exceptional’. In this picture, the policy process is insulated from other policy concerns, has a distinctive system of actors and institutional structures, and is rooted in extensive governmental intervention in the market and the redistribution of resources from taxpayers to food producers. Recently there have been suggestions that a ‘post-exceptional’ agricultural politics has emerged, which is more market-driven, has reduced state intervention, and where policies reflect influences relating to non-food issues such as the environment. This contribution discusses the concepts of compartmentalization and exceptionalism and then applies ‘indicators of change’ to a case study of the 2013 reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). It concludes that the reform provides evidence for ‘shallow’ post-exceptionalism where a historically persistent agricultural policy subsystem has opened up to new actors, incorporated some programme change but left the ideational framework largely intact

Devolution aspects of Brexit

A post Brexit referendum report on devolution and agriculture, written for the Yorkshire Agricultural Society and the Farmer Scientist Network

Devolution aspects of Brexit and agriculture

A submission requested by the House of Lords European Union Committee for its enquiry into Brexit and Agricultur

The common agricultural policy and the EU budget: Stasis or change?

After highlighting the budgetary context and the historical trends on the funding of the CAP, this paper considers contemporary debates about its reform in the context of two ‘historic firsts’. Negotiations about the multiannual financial framework (MFF) for 2014-20 for the first time took place in tandem with a proposed CAP reform, within the broader context set by the financial crisis after 2008. Second, the CAP reform debates took place within the new institutional arrangements introduced in the Lisbon Treaty, which by extending the co-decision mechanism to the CAP potentially has increased the influence of the European Parliament (EP). Indeed the CAP reform dossiers were the first real test of these new arrangements and provide an insight into how the new institutional structure will work in practice. In both cases the paper highlights a continuing cleavage among member states and stakeholder interests - that maps partly onto a broader budgetary gainers/losers division - between advocates of radical reform (e.g. the UK, Sweden) and those who favour the retention of the traditional CAP (such as France, Spain and Ireland)

The European referendum: Agriculture, food and rural policy issues

Pre-referendum briefing paper on agricultural and food aspects of Brexit

2010 Olympic Costs and Benefits

Hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics cannot be justified on economic grounds alone. "The Games are not attractive from a financial point of view," says Dr. Marvin Shaffer, co-author of the study and one of the architects of British Columbia's Multiple Account Guidelines (used for undertaking cost-benefit analyses of major capital projects). "If Vancouver hosts the 2010 Winter Olympics, there will be a substantial net cost to British Columbians in the order of $1.2 billion."Alan Greer, co-author of the study, says the economic benefits of hosting the Games are limited. "Job creation estimates have been wildly exaggerated. Realistic employment estimates range from 1,500 to 5,600 jobs created over the seven years the Games are estimated to have an impact. Based on a net cost of$1.2 billion to host the Games, that's a public subsidy of $220,000 to$820,000 per job."The Olympics also carry significant environmental and social risks. "There are some innovative ideas in the Bid Book for mitigating social and environmental costs, but many of them haven't been budgeted and, if implemented, will likely mean increases to the overall cost of the Games." says Celine Mauboules, co-author of the study."That's not to say the Olympics don't have benefits," says Mauboules. "The positive impacts for British Columbians include the pride and enjoyment from hosting the Games, the opportunity to attend events, and the use of new sports, housing and transportation facilities, to name a few."Seth Klein, the CCPA's BC Director, says the question for policy makers and the public is: Do the benefits outweigh the substantial price tag that comes with hosting the Games? "To date, the public has received inadequate information about the costs and benefits of hosting the Winter Olympics. We've basically done government's job for them. Both federal and provincial guidelines recommend the use of multiple account evaluations for such an initiative. Yet neither level of government, nor the Bid Corporation, has undertaken such an evaluation.""The Olympics have too often been pitched as having miraculous economic powers," says Klein "They do not. Like all public policy choices, they come with benefits and costs, and will require trade-offs.

Atomistic modelling of thermal-cycling rejuvenation in metallic glasses

Cycling of a metallic glass between ambient and cryogenic temperatures can induce higher-energy states characteristic of glass formation on faster cooling. This rejuvenation, unexpected because it occurs at small macroscopic strains and well below the temperatures of thermally induced structural change, is important, for example, in improving plasticity. Molecular-dynamics simulations elucidate the mechanisms by which thermal cycling can induce relaxation (reaching lower energy) as well as rejuvenation. Thermal cycling, over tens of cycles, drives local atomic rearrangements progressively erasing the initial glass structure. This arises mainly from the heating stage in each thermal cycle, linked to the intrinsic structural heterogeneity in metallic glasses. Although, in particular, the timescales in MD simulations are shorter than in physical experiments, the present simulations reproduce many physically observed effects, suggesting that they may be useful in optimizing thermal cycling for tuning the properties of metallic glasses and glasses in general

Catastrophic vs Gradual Collapse of Thin-Walled Nanocrystalline Ni Hollow Cylinders As Building Blocks of Microlattice Structures

Lightweight yet stiff and strong lattice structures are attractive for various engineering applications, such as cores of sandwich shells and components designed for impact mitigation. Recent breakthroughs in manufacturing enable efficient fabrication of hierarchically architected microlattices, with dimensional control spanning seven orders of magnitude in length scale. These materials have the potential to exploit desirable nanoscale-size effects in a macroscopic structure, as long as their mechanical behavior at each appropriate scale – nano, micro, and macro levels – is properly understood. In this letter, we report the nanomechanical response of individual microlattice members. We show that hollow nanocrystalline Ni cylinders differing only in wall thicknesses, 500 and 150 nm, exhibit strikingly different collapse modes: the 500 nm sample collapses in a brittle manner, via a single strain burst, while the 150 nm sample shows a gradual collapse, via a series of small and discrete strain bursts. Further, compressive strength in 150 nm sample is 99.2% lower than predicted by shell buckling theory, likely due to localized buckling and fracture events observed during in situ compression experiments. We attribute this difference to the size-induced transition in deformation behavior, unique to nanoscale, and discuss it in the framework of “size effects” in crystalline strength