Explore the vast range of titles available.

As the era of thriving, small-scale fishing communities continues to wane across waters that once teamed with (a way of) life, Fiona McCormack opens a window into contemporary fisheries quota systems, laying bare how neoliberalism has entangled itself in our approach to environmental management. Grounded in fieldwork in New Zealand, Iceland, Ireland and Hawaii, McCormack offers up a comparative analysis of the mechanisms driving the transformations unleashed by a new era of ocean grabbing. Exploring the processes of privatisation in ecosystem services, Private Oceans traces how value has been repositioned in the market, away from productive activities. The result? The demise of the small-scale sector, the collapse of fishing communities, cultural loss, and the emergence of a newly propertied class of producers - the armchair fisherman. Ultimately, Private Oceans demonstrates that the deviations from the capitalist norm explored in this book offer grounds for the reimagining of both fisheries economies and broader environmental systems.

The rapid expansion of electoral gender quotas in the past few decades has been met with considerable scholarly and public attention. Despite this, there has been little empirical work examining the global legislative consequences of gender quotas over time. Developing a unique time-series cross-sectional data set from 139 states during the peak period of quota adoption and implementation (1995–2012), we test whether and how quotas are associated with subsequent changes in government spending priorities. We find that substantial quota shocks—those associated with a large increase in women’s parliamentary representation—are followed by increased government expenditures toward public health. Further, we find that increases in health spending are offset by relative decreases in military spending and other spending categories. Our findings provide strong evidence that quota policies influence government priorities in historically feminized policy areas but principally when they are complied with and have substantial numerical consequences.

The aim of this study is to investigate the relationship between the fairness of quota judgment and the level of moral competency of students and professors. This work was conducted with 317 college students and 15 professors from a base course for engineering at a Public University. We use a structured questionnaire to collect data, composed of a dilemma of quotas and eight arguments related to justice and eight to injustice of quotas. We still apply the Moral Competence Test (MCT_xt), which considers affective and cognitive aspects of the judgment and gives rise to score - C. The results indicated the low C index of the participants, conflict of interest in the judgment of the fairness of quota and the racial issue as the main disagreement factor. Among non-quota students, the higher the C index, the more they considered quotas like unfairness and among quota students, the lower the C score, the greater the choice for fairness. For judgments based on equity, as in the case of affirmative actions, higher levels of moral development would be necessary. Education has an essential role in developing students’ moral competence and, consequently, in promoting their participation in social, civic and professional life.

In fisheries management—as in environmental governance more generally—regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas. These include conceptual narratives that make easy answers like panaceas seem plausible, power disconnects that create vested interests in panaceas, and heuristics and biases that prevent people from accurately assessing panaceas. Analysts have suggested many approaches to avoiding panaceas, but most fail to conquer the underlying panacea mindset. Here, we suggest the codevelopment of an institutional diagnostics toolkit to distill the vast amount of information on fisheries governance into an easily accessible, open, on-line database of checklists, case studies, and related resources. Toolkits like this could be used in many governance settings to challenge users’ understandings of a policy’s impacts and help them develop solutions better tailored to their particular context. They would not replace the more comprehensive approaches found in the literature but would rather be an intermediate step away from the problem of panaceas.

In 2003, a new law required that 40% of Norwegian firms' directors be women—at the time only 9% of directors were women. We use the prequota crosssectional variation in female board representation to instrument for exogenous changes to corporate boards following the quota. We find that the constraint imposed by the quota caused a significant drop in the stock price at the announcement of the law and a large decline in Tobin's Q over the following years, consistent with the idea that firms choose boards to maximize value. The quota led to younger and less experienced boards, increases in leverage and acquisitions, and deterioration in operating performance.

The new Romanian Civil Code regulates the special available quota of the surviving spouse, in Article 1090, which, in its content, represents a compromise between the two main lines of thought, outlined in the doctrine, regarding the interpretation and application of the previous regulation, contained in Article 939 of the Romanian Civil Code of 1864.Article 1090, specified above, in paragraph (2), establishes the legal fate of the difference between the ordinary available quota and the special available quota of the surviving spouse, providing that this difference belongs, in its entirety, to the descendants, in case the deceased does not dispose of it through liberalities. Contrary to the clear and unmistakable meaning of this legal provision, an opinion emerged in the doctrine, which became of the majority, according to which the difference between the quotas belongs to the descendants not only if the deceased did not dispose of it, but also when the deceased disposed of it through liberalities in favour of the surviving spouse, but the provision is ineffective as a result of exceeding the special available quota.The present study makes a demonstration of the unfounded character of that opinion, by confronting it with the relevant legal provisions and with the results reached by applying, in this case, the unanimously accepted methods of legal interpretation, emphasizing at the same time the fact that from these it follows that the correct interpretation is the one according to which the difference between the quotas is divided between the surviving spouse and descendants according to the legal succession quotas.

This article theorizes and uses global and longitudinal data on gender quota laws to investigate how levels and dimensions of democracy affect the adoption of different quotatypes. Our results demonstrate that countries at middle levels of the democracy scale are more likely to adopt quotas. Within this diverse group of countries, those that have relatively low levels of electoral contestation (i.e., limited political rights) are most likely to adopt reserved seats. On the other hand, the likelihood of adopting candidate quotas is highest in countries where the protection of civil liberties (i.e., individual freedoms of association, etc.) is moderately high. Our findings suggest that different levels and dimensions of democracy provide political actors with incentives and constraints that create distinct trajectories for quota adoption.

If trade barriers are managed by inefficient institutions, trade liberalization can lead to greater-than-expected gains. We examine Chinese textile and clothing exports before and after the elimination of externally imposed export quotas. Both the surge in export volume and the decline in export prices following quota removal are driven by net entry. This outcome is inconsistent with a model in which quotas are allocated based on firm productivity, implying misallocation of resources. Removing this misallocation accounts for a substantial share of the overall gain in productivity associated with quota removal.

This article aims to rethink the operation of norms in international policy diffusion. Norms do not simply standardize state behaviors, as is conventionally argued; norms also draw on and set up hierarchical social orders among states. Through a conceptual rethinking we gain a better understanding of where—among which states—new policies may first emerge: social hierarchies create incentives for new policies to develop at the margins of international society so that policies may diffuse “from below.” We also get a better grasp of how policy advocates frame the appropriateness or benefits of a new state practice: they must frame policy demands in terms of the international standing and rank of the targeted state. This article's empirical aspiration is to use these insights to help account for the international policy diffusion of legal sex quotas, a policy to increase the level of female legislators that developed first among “developing” states rather than among the so-called core of international society. By pointing to the link between norms and social hierarchy, the article helps account for policy diffusion “from below.”