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Arabica Robusta

Embedding Evidence on Conservation Interventions Within a Context of Multilevel Governa... - 0 views

  • An effective response to the wide variety in governance and ecological systems therefore calls for the creation of new decision-making forums that engage diverse constellations of actors and knowledge across spatial and temporal scales, in ways relevant to specific decisions (Paavola et al. 2009). This in turn raises issues of democratic legitimacy and accountability, because for citizens it may become difficult to assume democratic responsibilities when being part of overlapping sites of decision-making (Peters & Pierre 2005).
    • Arabica Robusta
       
      Conservation governance and democratic accountability
  • The second step will be to ensure that scientists, policy makers, and practitioners participate in the cocreation of policy-relevant science, going beyond identifying stakeholder-relevant questions for systematic reviews. From the outset, scientists and decision-makers should jointly consider how administrative and ecological scales fit in order to balance democratic legitimacy and ecological efficacy.
  • By being clear as to the types and scales of knowledge needed, and the limitations of existing knowledge to inform policy, decision-makers will also play a role in highlighting knowledge gaps. We thus frame decision-makers as actively participating stakeholders in shaping what evidence base is needed for conservation, rather than framing conservation policy as something that must respond to the agenda of scientists who produce evidence. As a consequence, there is a strong need to develop practical solutions, based on a joint effort by researchers, decision-makers and land-use planners, on how to integrate evidence-based practices and general ecological principles within a multilevel governance framework. Through embedding locally implemented conservation interventions within a broader context, we are confident they would gain both in legitimacy and effectiveness.
tony curzon price

Global Financial Integrity Project - The Ugliest Chapter in Global Economic Affairs Sin... - 0 views

  • Ten years ago I stepped out of international business and into the think-tank community with a primary goal of getting reality on the table. I had seen more corruption, more money laundering, more financial crime than any one person should see in a lifetime, and I resolved to say what I wanted to say about this overarching reality. Why wasn’t reality already on the table? What is it about this subject matter that is so mysterious or so frightening that we hesitate to go there? Basically is it that we can’t see it or don’t want to see it?
    • tony curzon price
       
      money laundering / tax evasion .... for an interview
  • This is the reality that we seek to get on the table. Illicit outflows from developing and transitional economies vastly exceed overseas development assistance going into developing and transitional economies. In my estimates, which I and others think are conservative, by a factor of ten to one. More analysis, better analysis in the future may make this a narrower picture or make it a wider picture. But no analysis will make this a pretty picture.
tony curzon price

LRB | Jerry Fodor: Why Pigs Don't Have Wings - 0 views

  • The crucial test is whether one’s pet theory can distinguish between selection for trait A and selection for trait B when A and B are coextensive: were polar bears selected for being white or for matching their environment? Search me; and search any kind of adaptationism I’ve heard of. Nor am I holding my breath till one comes along.
  • Lacking arches, domes fall down; so arches are selected for supporting domes. But arches are linked to spandrels for reasons of geometry; so spandrels aren’t selected for, they are ‘free riders’ on selection for arches. The moral is that phenotypic traits can carry information about linkages among the mechanisms that produce them. Free-riding is always suggestive of such linkages, and free-riding is ubiquitous in evolution.
    • tony curzon price
       
      if you like something that is a result of free-riding, beware - your liking it has no selectionist impact on its existence
  • When you ask Darwin’s question – why are phenotypes often similar? – you do indeed get Darwin’s answer. But if you ask instead why it is that some phenotypes don’t occur, an adaptationist explanation often sounds somewhere between implausible and preposterous. For example, nobody, not even the most ravening of adaptationists, would seek to explain the absence of winged pigs by claiming that, though there used to be some, the wings proved to be a liability so nature selected against them. Nobody expects to find fossils of a species of winged pig that has now gone extinct. Rather, pigs lack wings because there’s no place on pigs to put them. To add wings to a pig, you’d also have to tinker with lots of other things. In fact, you’d have to rebuild the pig whole hog: less weight, appropriate musculature, an appropriate metabolism, an apparatus for navigating in three dimensions, a streamlined silhouette and god only knows what else; not to mention feathers. The moral is that if you want them to have wings, you will have to redesign pigs radically. But natural selection, since it is incremental and cumulative, can’t do that sort of thing. Evolution by natural selection is inherently a conservative process, and once you’re well along the evolutionary route to being a pig, your further options are considerably constrained; you can’t, for example, go back and retrofit feathers.
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  • ‘We don’t approve of eating grandmother because having her around to baby-sit was useful in the hunter-gatherer ecology.’
tony curzon price

A Righter Shade of Green - 0 views

  • While the Left pursues environmentalism to advance its global agenda, conservation is best entrusted to local stewardship.
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    Roger on how ecology translates into politics. Is there right and left greenery?

    And what of a _global_ issue like climate change - can it really be reduced to its local impact?

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