Explore the vast range of titles available.

Although subsidiarity is dipolar, preference has been for the “lower” pole at the early stages of its development as a principle in Quadragesimo Anno: the “higher” administrative unit should act only if the “lower” unit could not deal with the issue. But in a generation, Pacem in Terris posited a nuance that put the preference on the “higher” unit. The capabilities of “higher” units could supersede the rights of “lower” units because the “on reserve” aid from “higher” units leads to more effectivity. Then, applying integral ecology, Laudato Si’ put the preference on the “higher” pole when issues are environmental in character. This stems from an understanding of complex and interconnected mechanisms in the interaction between populations and the environment. Because Nature has predetermined ways of acting and reacting to events like those caused by populations, Nature relays the impact of actions, such as environmental backlash, to other locations, sections, or later generations; it can also “slap back” at the local agents of events. Thus, the default option should be for the “higher” units to act when it comes to researching the complex interconnections of actions at the ecological level. But this option can lead to gaming the deliberations on public policy with questions of uncertainty or risk because valid understanding is needed to guide actions or policies. Perspectives broader than the local in terms of understanding and of values to be shared are needed.

Do oil prices and stock markets move in tandem or in opposite directions? The complex and time varying relationship between oil prices and stock markets has caught the attention of the financial press, investors, policymakers, researchers, and the general public in recent years. In light of such attention, this paper reviews research on the oil price and stock market relationship. The majority of papers we survey study the impacts of oil markets on stock markets, whereas, little research in the reverse direction exists. Our review finds that the causal effects between oil and stock markets depend heavily on whether research is performed using aggregate stock market indices, sectorial indices, or firm-level data and whether stock markets operate in net oil-importing or net oil-exporting countries. Additionally, conclusions vary depending on whether studies use symmetric or asymmetric changes in the price of oil, or whether they focus on unexpected changes in oil prices. Finally, we find that most studies show oil price volatility transmits to stock market volatility, and that including measures of stock market performance improves forecasts of oil prices and oil price volatility. Several important avenues for further research are identified.

This research investigates the connectedness and the tail risk spillover between clean energy and oil firms, from January 2011 to October 2021. To this, we use the Tail-Event driven NETworks (TENET) risk model. This approach allows for a measurement of the dynamics of tail-risk spillover for each sector and firm. Hence, we can provide a detailed picture of the existing extreme relationships within these markets. We find that the total connection between the markets varies during the period analysed, showing how the uncertainty in oil price plays a critical role in the risk dynamics for oil companies. Also, we find that relationships between energy firms tend to be intrasectoral; that is, each sector receives (emits) risk from (to) itself. These results can have important practical implications for risk management and policymakers.

The United Nations (UN) 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development has considerable potential for achieving a more sustainable future. However, the concrete realisation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is impeded by how they are implemented by a diverse set of competent agents. This conceptual paper draws on social impact theory to investigate how businesses can utilise the SDG framework to achieve positive social outcomes. We identify two pathways that can guide businesses to improve their SDGs interventions, which entail considering the interconnections between the goals that are directly or indirectly affected by the initiative at stake and the inclusiveness of the actors affected by the SDGs. Building on the literature on hybrid organising (to frame interconnectedness) and the literature on multi-stakeholder partnerships and deliberative governance (to frame inclusiveness), we discuss a set of organisational mechanisms and transformations that can help businesses ensure that their SDGs interventions are more socially impactful. By doing so, this paper extends the literature on the role of companies for sustainable development and provides some practical implications.

Boosting the externalities across the water, energy, food, and waste (WEFW) sectors is challenging, especially considering tightening constraints such as population growth, climate change, resource-intensive lifestyles, increased waste production, sanitary crises and many others. The nexus approach supports the transition to a more sustainable future because intersectoral trade-offs can be reduced and externalities exploited, making imperative for decision makers, entrepreneurs, and civil society to simultaneously engage, with respect to all the components of the nexus. This research addressed intersectoral synergies and trade-offs in the case of the WEFW nexus in Romania, judging from the perspectives of entrepreneurial activity and economic results. The objective of this research was to explore the nexus in-depth by statistically analyzing the financial and economic indicators reported by active enterprises at county-level, based on the Romanian Ministry of Public Finance data. Research results describe the effects of the policies implemented in the fields of WEFW sectors. At the same time, attention was paid to the quality of the entrepreneurial activity, analyzed from the perspective of economic performance. This paper fills a research gap regarding the WEFW nexus by resorting to an economic and entrepreneurial performance assessment in order to find sectoral pathways toward policy cohesion in Romania. Findings suggested the existence of major trade-offs among sectors, owing to the fact that each county has a different development degree.

This article explores the decolonial possibilities of Tadek as a dance of cosmic interconnectedness and solidarity, by unveiling its underlying ontological, epistemological, and axiological principles. Tadek is a traditional dance of the Itneg people in the Philippine Cordillera region that embodies their indigenous world views on eco-spirituality and theo-cosmology. By offering and constructing a theoepistemic otherwise through Tadek, this article hopes to surface a decolonial theo-cosmology that brings about planetary justice and creation solidarity. Like other traditional dances in indigenous areas, Tadek offers a creative epistemic horizon for a theo-decolonial future.    

In linguistic/semiotic landscape (LSL) studies, overall, time and temporalities have occupied a curious space between visibility and invisibility, resulting in time and temporalities being treated as an optional, additive, subordinate, or separate dimension in the linguistic and semiotic study of place-making. The term semiotic timescape serves as a heuristic concept which endeavours to centre time and its imbrication with space/place, with an explicit focus on the semiosis of ‘temporalized place-making’. The five articles in this special issue highlight the ‘complex and multiplex’ dimensions of time (Adam 2008) interconnected with spaces/places, as important aspects in understanding social realities and practices, via entanglements with multimodal meaning-making, materialities, embodiment, and politics of social actors and communities. (Semiotic timescapes, interconnectedness of time and space, complexities and multiplexities, multimodality, materialities)*

The concept of resilience—i.e., the ability of a unified structure to absorb shocks—is of high relevance in the context of network modelling and analysis, mainly when referred to finance. This paper starts from this premise, and deals with the resilience of a financial interbanking system. At this aim, we firstly introduce a new measure of the resilience of a network, by taking into full consideration the influence of the topology of the network and the weights of its links in the shocks propagation; then, we build one financial network model related to the quarterly-based interbanking sector, whose weights are calibrated on high quality empirical data; lastly, we compute the resilience measure of the considered networks. A discussion of the results is provided, by considering both finance and network theory perspectives.