General Policy Direction Research Articles

Tenth Session of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea: Changing of the US Position (1981)

40 years ago, the Third UN Conference on the Law of the Sea adopted the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (1982). Although the United States, together with the USSR and other major maritime powers, initiated the conference, in 1981, after Reagan became President of the United States, it called for a comprehensive review of the draft Convention that had by then been prepared. Proponents of continuing the compromise policy were removed from the US delegation at the Conference. American efforts during the 10th session of the Conference were focused on delaying negotiations and preventing the formalisation of the Convention text to prolong the work of the Conference for another year. Drawing on US Department of State documents and up-to-date academic literature, the author examines the conduct of US diplomacy during the first year of the Reagan Administration at the 3rd UN Conference on the Law of the Sea, during the preparation and work of the 10th session of the Conference (1981). He concludes that US policy at the 10th session of the Conference was in line with the general policy direction of the US Administration, which had made a definitive break with the détente policy and staked on a new aggravation of the international situation. The Administration's relationship with big business, dissatisfied with the provisions of the draft Convention regarding deep seabed mineral development beyond national jurisdictions, also appears to have been an important factor behind the change in the US position on the draft Convention.

Developing Ecotourism and its Supporting MSMs Using Performance, Opportunity and Results Analysis. Case Study in Pekalongan Regency, Indonesia

The development of the tourism sector and its supporting MSMEs have a positive impact on the society. However, various classic problems of MSME cause the MSME’s competitiveness be relatively low and have not been able to provide optimal benefits for the community. Efforts to empower MSMEs and tourism are important to do. Empowerment policy must be comprehensive. Therefore, general policy directions, strategies and priority issues have to be formulated to suit the conditions and needs to achieve the goal. Using an Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) approach combined with a Strength, Opportunity analysis Aspiration and Result (SOAR) analysis approach, this study aimed to formulate general policy directions and strategies and to highlight the priority of the issues. The study, conducted in Pekalongan Regency, Indonesia. There were 60 participants that come from local governments, academics, and community leaders as respondents. The results show that promotion and price mix are considered relatively high importance-low performance. Meanwhile, SOAR analysis shows that the endowment factors, the motivation of MSME’s actors and government policies are their strength. Thus, in the short term, it is necessary to increase price and promotion performances to improve the quality of tourism MSMs. In the long term, it is necessary to strengthen institutions and improve the quality of human resources.

Distorted policy transfer? South Korea’s adaptation of UK social enterprise policy

ABSTRACTThis study draws upon communicative processes in policy transfer to consider the ways in which policy may be adapted to context or distorted. The theoretical framework is used to investigate exactly what the South Korean government borrowed from UK social enterprise policy. Despite claims that the UK was the source of both the general policy direction and the particular regulatory device, the Korean government did not learn about the specific contexts of the British policy, nor attempt two-way communication with domestic stakeholders. Rather, the UK policy was interpreted in accordance with the Korean government’s own ideas about how to utilize social enterprise. Historical legacies of top-down decision-making played an important role in this process, as did the state’s role as a regulator which mobilizes the private sector to achieve policy goals. The consequences have been negative for those organizations refused social enterprise status under the Ministry of Labor’s strict approval system, as well as for the original target population: the socially disadvantaged and vulnerable. It is suggested that the model advanced may help to illuminate the reasons why some borrowed policies differ considerably from the originals, and the use of policy transfer as a means of legitimization.

New drivers of Brazilian foreign policy: general policy directions and relations with Balkans

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Editorial matters

I have now been editing Transactions for half of my five year stretch in the post and the rhythm of life as an editor is becoming no less baffling. In my last editorial (Tickell 2004), I was very explicit about the flow of papers to the journal and the editorial responses that we had made, and received derisive phone calls and emails from the editors of other journals in geography, who suggested that the result would be that authors would stop submitting to Transactions. Although this didn't happen, it would be dishonest to suggest that there hadn't been something of a dip, and the result is that the time taken from acceptance to publication remains less than six months. I would be very reluctant, however, to conclude that my exercise in the freedom of information has failed and I will continue to publish fuller data on the number of manuscripts being submitted to the journal than is the norm. Less bureaucratically, I remain in awe of the sheer range and quality of the geographical research and scholarship that we receive and publish. Whilst it is almost impossible to define our discipline, its intellectual strength and diversity is well represented in Transactions and I remain indebted to the guidance and support of the journal's editorial advisory board. When I took over, I introduced a policy of rotating the membership of this advisory board – both to relieve the burden on long-standing members (who, for nothing other than a warm glow, each referee an inordinate number of manuscripts) and to refresh the feel of the journal. As I signalled in my last editorial, the long-serving members of the board are now retiring. It is hard to over-estimate the importance of the advice I've received from Nick Clifford, Felix Driver, Jane Jacobs, Jamie Peck, Kirsten Simonsen and Sarah Whatmore. This is true both on individual papers and on the general policy direction of the journal as a whole. For Jamie and Sarah this has been given freely even though they both edit ‘competitor’ journals and I was delighted that Felix has recently been appointed as editor of the Journal of Historical Geography against an outstanding field. I would also like to welcome new members to the – slightly expanded –Transactions editorial board. The new members were invited following discussions with the existing board and we have aimed to increase the range of physical geographic expertise, to recognize the international reach of the journal with a greater number of non-UK based expertise, and to continue to reflect the diversity of interests that exists in geography. Nick Blomley (Simon Fraser) is best known for his development of research on law and space and has recently focused his interests on property relations; Gail Davies (UCL) is a cultural geographer whose work explores the relationship between scientific and everyday knowledges, most notably with an empirical focus on animals; Gernot Grabher (Bonn) works on the socio-economics of space and uses evolutionary economics to engage in a critical interrogation of networks; Robyn Longhurst (Waikato) explores the production of bodies and spaces, social exclusion and ‘difference’, and cultural landscapes; Dave Martin (Southampton) is a quantitative human geographer whose expertise in both GIS and demographic modelling is recognized by his being both the co-ordinator of the Economic and Social Research Council's research programme on the last UK Census and the co-director of the National Centre for Research Methods; Tavi Murray (Swansea) is a glaciologist whose research investigates glacier dynamics and flow instabilities, glacier responses to rapid climate change and glacier geophysics; Richa Nagar (Minnesota) straddles women's studies and geography and is interested in the mutually constitutive relationships among social spaces, identities, resistance and change, and her current research is exploring grassroots development in India; Phil O’Neill (Newcastle, New South Wales) is a post-structuralist economic geographer who combines his academic life with that of a – too frequently for his own comfort – controversial columnist on his local paper; Bill Nickling (Guelph) is a geomorphologist who combines both field research and modelling in order to understand arid lands, aeolian processes and landscape development; and finally Jonathan Phillips (Kentucky) is developing a theory regarding the structure, function and behaviour of earth surface systems, involving the interactions of landforms, soils, climate and the biosphere, which is both theoretical and emphasizes field-testable hypotheses and real-world manifestations of complex system behaviour. Welcome aboard!

Planning for Metropolitan Sustainability

This article establishes a framework for thinking about sustainable development in the metropolitan context by investigating the origins of the sustainability concept and its meanings when applied to urban development, surveying historical approaches to planning the urban region, and analyzing ways in which a context can be created for regional sustainability planning. Sustainability is seen as requiring a holistic, long-term planning approach, as well as certain general policy directions such as compact urban form, reductions in automobile use, protection of ecosystems, and improved equity. Based on the experience of three sample regions, the article suggests a long-term strategic approach in which vision statements, coalition building, institutional development, intergovernmental incentive frameworks, indicators, public involvement, and social learning help create a regional context in which sustainable development is increasingly possible.

Telefilm Canada Investment in Feature Films: Empirical Foundations for Public Policy

The most important current approach to supporting the feature film industry is through direct investment by Telefilm Canada. In this paper we set out to provide empirical foundations to guide Telefilm's investment strategy. To provide context for the empirical analysis, the rationale for government subsidy is analysed to determine the appropriate goals for such a strategy. Our empirical analysis is primarily designed to determine whether, as is commonly supposed, these goals are in conflict and hence policy-makers are inevitably faced with difficult trade-offs. We find that, generally speaking, this is not the case. Our empirical work also sheds light on the advisability of the Federal Government's general policy direction away from tax incentives and toward direct investment and negotiation of international co-production treaties.