Global Change Pressures Research Articles

Managing water in the city of the future; strategic planning and science

1 IntroductionIncreasing global change pressures, escalating costsand other risks inherent to conventional urban watermanagement are causing cities to face ever increasingdifficulties in efficiently managing scarcer and lessreliable water resources.In order to meet these challenges SWITCH(Sustainable Water Management Improves Tomor-row’s Cities Health) is facilitating a paradigm shift inurban water management. SWITCH is an EU fundedaction research program being implemented and co-funded by a cross-disciplinary team of 33 partnersfrom across the globe, including 17 from the EU and12 from developing countries. The ‘‘consortium’’comprises the academic and urban planning fields,water utilities and consultants. This network ofresearchers and practitioners are working directlywith stakeholders in ten cities (see Fig. 1). Theoverall goal behind this global consortium is tocatalyse change towards more sustainable urbanwater management in the ‘‘City of the Future’’.Demonstrating research and sharing knowledgeacross a range of different geographical, climaticand socio-cultural settings is expected to lead toglobal adoption and acceleration of more sustainablesolutions.The SWITCH research process is a combination of:• Learning Alliances—SWITCH is linking up awide range of stakeholders at city level to interactproductively and to create win-win solutionsalong the water chain. They consist of a seriesof structured platforms, at different institutionallevels (national, river basin, city, communityetc.), designed to break down barriers to bothhorizontal and vertical information sharingthereby speeding up the process of identification,adaptation, and uptake of new innovations. LA’shave been established in Accra, Alexandria,Beijing, Belo Horzionte, Birmingham, Cali,Hamburg, Lima, Lodz, Tel Aviv and Zaragoza.• Action Research—SWITCH is carrying out moredemand-led, action-orientated research in citieswith a view to achieving greater integration andwider impact through the Learning Alliances.• Multiple-way learning—SWITCH is promotingmultiple-way learning, where European citieslearn from each other and from developingcountries, and vice versa.2 Strategic planning and scientific assessmentof strategiesOne goal of SWITCH is to develop new strategicplans for water management in the cities mentioned

Adjustment strategies revisited: Agricultural change in the Welsh Marches

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, much attention was paid by British agricultural geographers to the restructuring of the farm sector under pressures of national, European and global change. The need to adopt a perspective capable of looking beyond the farm gate inspired the introduction of modified political economy approaches into agricultural research. One important cornerstone of the empirical application of this thesis was the concept of the ‘farm adjustment strategy’. This attempted to map out the responses, especially those of survival, made by farm family businesses to rapidly changing agrarian conditions. Subsequently, the farm adjustment strategy became remarkable for its popularity as a way to organise research into agricultural change in developed market economies. Following a retreat in the 1990s, there has been something of a recent revival in the use of the term ‘strategy’ relating to agricultural adjustment. Revisiting this concept is therefore timely. Using empirical evidence from studies of farming change in the Welsh Marches, this paper examines two issues. First, it makes a critical re-examination of the concept to resolve differences with interpretation linked to theoretical perspectives so that future misuse can be minimised. Second, an attempt is made to assess the relevance of defined elements of farm adjustment strategies to analyses of farm business change. In so doing, there is an attempt to recover our knowledge of agrarian restructuring and to help situate newly encultured investigations into the likely survival of family labour-based forms of production.

Suivi écologique des récifs coralliens des stations IFRECOR de 2001 à 2006 en Martinique

Ecological monitoring of coral reefs in IFRECOR survey sites in Martinique between 2001 and 2006. – Monitoring of coral reefs in Martinique started in 2001, after the first permanent IFRECOR survey site was created in the island. Four permanent transects of 60 m long are sampled twice a year during the dry and the wet season in the area. Benthic community cover and fi sh assemblages are assessed using scuba diving techniques. The benthic communities composition remained stable, while already degraded, until end 2005 with average coral cover values of 38.7 % over the Southern reef sites and 22.9 % on the Atlantic coast. The major bleaching event during the second semester of the year 2005 killed about 14 % of the coral colonies in Martinique. Beginning 2006, a disease outbreak also killed another 15 % of the corals, with significant differences between species. Globally, although coral reef decline had started before these events, an average of 30 % of the coral reefs of Martinique disappeared during the past 2 years. Thereby, there was a decrease in the average coral cover down to 32.9 % (South Caribbean) and 14.8 % (Atlantic). No effect has been recorded yet on coral reef fish assemblages in terms of total biodiversity, individuals and biomass. Global climate change and anthropogenic pressures are principally involved in the coral reef ecological status in Martinique. Regional MPAs projects are under review and could be an environmental issue for coral reef protection and preservation in the future.

Management accounting systems change and departmental performance: the influence of managerial information and task uncertainty

Despite the proliferation of new management accounting techniques amidst pressures of organizational and global change, the issue of changes in firm-wide management accounting and control systems (MACSs) has largely been ignored in the research literature. This study explores the indirect effect of MACSs change on departmental performance for a cross-sectional sample of 232 medium-sized Singaporean firms. It is hypothesized that MACSs change affects performance but not directly. Instead, this relationship is mediated by managerial-relevant information (MRI) that is impacted by MACSs change, which, in turn, enhances performance. Task uncertainty is expected to moderate the intervening linkages; specifically, the latter are anticipated to strengthen under conditions of more task variability and task difficulty and, thus, augment the indirect effect of MACSs change on performance. The results offer support for the positive indirect effect of improving departmental performance from more MRI, triggered by MACSs change. Although not large, the indirect effect is strengthened when task variability and task difficulty are high. Overall, the findings are consistent with the stated purposes of management accounting that are embedded in normative definitions, and which are relied upon to motivate the framework for analysis.

Fast but fragile: British restructuring for foreign direct investment in a global era

In the ‘globalization’ debates of the early 1990s, the Anglo-American practices of rapid restructuring to achieve ‘attractiveness’ to foreign direct investment tended to be presented as the universal panacea for dealing with the pressures of global change. However, the East Asian economic crises of the late 1990s have precipitated a widespread questioning, both of the export-oriented ‘Asian model’ of development, and of the possible contagion spreading to the western financial market and ‘FDI attracting’ western states. This article considers the ‘fast but fragile’ nature of Anglo-Saxon style restructuring in the light of the political-economic and social crises experienced by East Asian state-societies. The discussion focuses specifically on the British approach to restructuring for FDI, arguing that this reflects and embodies both a distinctive set of state-societal relations, and a distinctive understanding of what the process of globalization implies for these relations.