Unregulated Areas Research Articles

Intermedial Maps: The Street as Site of Cultural-Political Regulation in Modern Brazil

Since the late 19th century Rio de Janeiro has grown in relation to two primary spatial axes: the planned and regularized cidade (“city”) where most wealth and power are located; and the unregulated morro (“hill”) where most poverty has been concentrated. The history of social order in modern Brazil may not flow from the city per se, but rather from the streets that link cidade and morro the spaces that channel movement between regulated and unregulated areas of the city. One might argue that the modernization of Brazil since 1900 has followed the mapping of Rio de Janeiro’s streets over the same period. Such a claim would require a kind of “alternate” or “intermedial” cartography in which various media are employed to evoke a wide range of sensorial impressions of the city’s streets. This essay therefore attempts an intermedial mapping of Rio’s streets through readings of modernist poetry, modernist architecture, and post-modern television.

Ethische Richtlinien – eine Hilfe im ärztlichen Alltag?

Initially ethical guidelines in medicine were aimed at protecting the interests of trial participants. Over the last years, however, helpful guidelines for ethical decision-making and for the treatment and care of patients have gained more and more importance in clinical practice. On behalf of the Central Ethics Committee (CEC) of the Swiss Academy of Medical Sciences (SAMS) a number of task force groups have elaborated useful ethical guidelines for clinical practice and biomedical research. The ethical guidelines issued by SAMS cannot provide precise instructions on how to act and decide in the individual case but they serve as decision-making aids in clinical practice and provide orientation in legally unregulated medical areas. Although not actually lawful, most of these guidelines are considered a binding obligation under the Rules of Professional Conduct.

Institutional Proliferation and the Global Refugee Regime

This article explores the impact of institutional proliferation on the politics of refugee protection. The refugee regime mainly comprises the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Recently, however, new parallel and overlapping institutions have emerged in relation to two previously unregulated areas: internally displaced persons (IDPs) and international migration. This institutional proliferation has affected both state strategy and IO strategy in relation to refugee protection. It has enabled Northern states to engage in regime shifting. They have used the new institutions to prevent refugees reaching their territory, thereby avoiding incurring UN rules on refugee protection, and transferring burdens to Southern states. The resulting reduction in international cooperation in the refugee regime has contributed to UNHCR fundamentally redefining its strategy in order to become more relevant to Northern states. In particular, it has pursued states into the migration and IDP regimes into which they have shifted through a combination of stretching its mandate, engaging in the politics of the emerging regimes, and issue-linkage. The article's analysis draws attention to the potentially significant relationship between institutional proliferation and IO adaptation and change.

Filling Gaps and Black Holes: Restructuring the Financial Regulatory Apparatus for the Next Crisis (Written Testimony for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Hearing on the Adequacy of the U.S. Financial Regulatory System)

The current financial regulatory system is fractured and archaic. In my testimony I recommend that Congress consolidate the present system into three regulators: a financial markets regulator, bank capital regulator and systemic risk regulator. To the extent full financial integration is not politically achievable, Congress should create regulatory champions in each of these three areas who can dominate the remaining other regulators and grow and absorb them or their responsibilities over time. Any regulatory reform must also encompass the entirety of the financial system. It cannot leave gaps, black holes (i.e., deliberately unregulated areas) or financial institutions without potential oversight. To do otherwise would allow for regulatory arbitrage. In particular, any systemic risk regulator should have potential over the entire financial market and all financial institutions, including insurance companies, should be subject to financial regulatory oversight. Here, I emphasize that when I speak of providing oversight responsibility over the entire financial system, it does not necessarily equate with heightened substantive regulation, but the potential for regulation if a regulator exercising its prudent authority deems it appropriate. Congress should additionally build flexible regulators and a sustainable financial architecture but should leave the details of specific rules to be filled in by the selected regulator. Otherwise, Congress risks erecting rules that are either not adaptable to future changes or are not fully informed by later research on the financial crisis and our capital markets. In particular, Congress should require cost-benefit analysis for any rule-making by these new agencies.

Predicting the impact of plantation forestry on water users at local and regional scales: An example for the Murrumbidgee River Basin, Australia

To assess the potential impacts of land use change on river water users at both the local and regional scale requires models used in unregulated areas to be linked to river planning models for regulated river systems. This paper illustrates how a land use change model can be linked to the Integrated Quantity and Quality Model (IQQM) for the Murrumbidgee River system in southeastern Australia. Linking the two models allows the impact of potential plantation expansion to be assessed at various points throughout the river system and allows changes in streamflow in upland areas to be converted into impacts on allocations and diversion for downstream water users. To derive an envelope of responses, two plausible plantation expansion scenarios are considered. These are the planting of 30,000 ha in areas that will have the largest reduction in mean annual water yield, and the planting of 30,000 ha in areas that will have the smallest reduction in mean annual water yield. This paper shows that, at the regional scale, the impacts of these plantation scenarios are small on a mean annual basis, with reductions on allocations, diversions and end-of-system flows being 0.7%, 0.4% and 2.6%, respectively for the maximum impact scenario. However, when there is a large increase in the area of plantations in one sub-catchment, the local scale mean annual streamflow reductions can be significantly higher (up to 23% reduction for the modelled scenario), with larger percentage reductions seen in low flows than in the higher flows. Analysis of the annual impacts in the regulated system highlights the importance of looking at sequences of years and impacts in critical years with maximum annual reductions in allocations, diversions and end-of-system flows of 3.5%, 10% and 18% respectively for the maximum-impact water yield scenario. Linking the two models gives an insight into how management rules that control the regulated system can be triggered. This triggering of rules can result in small changes in upland area having large impacts downstream if key threshold values are affected. These impacts have the potential to be felt not only in the Murrumbidgee River system, but also outside in the Murray River system.

The global gun epidemic: from Saturday night specials to AK-47s

Cukier and Sidel provide a much-needed overview of the global problem of gun violence as a threat to public health, including the effects of violence, the sources of firearms (both legal and illegal), the factors shaping demand, and the interventions aimed at reducing the misuse of guns. Just as guns know no borders, gun violence has become a global epidemic, killing hundreds of thousands of people each year and injuring many more. The toll is staggering. Experts estimate that there are 35,000 annual gun-related deaths in Brazil, 10,000 in South Africa, 20,000 in Colombia, and 30,000 in the United States. While guns kill or maim great numbers of people in war zones, two thirds of small arms are in the possession of civilians. Although guns do not in and of themselves cause violence, they increase its lethality and fuel cultures of violence. This book documents the global gun trade, its threat to public health, and efforts to remedy the situation. Virtually every illegal gun begins as a legal gun. With the globalization of trade in licit products has come the globalization of the illegal trade in guns. For example, weapons originating in the United States fuel violence in Canada, Latin America, and as far away as Japan. And unregulated ownership of guns fuels crime. Because weapons tend to flow from unregulated areas to regulated areas, international cooperation is critical, but global efforts have been hampered by major arms producers and gun lobbies such as the National Rifle Association. Since 1998 there has been an emerging global movement to control the illicit trade and misuse in guns, and many countries have moved to strengthen their gun laws in an effort to combat this global epidemic.

Food Product Development, Food Regulations and Policies—Compatible or Not?

SUMMARY Laws and regulations govern many aspects of life in order to guide and protect individuals. The Food and Drug Administration regulates the development, production and marketing of foods, pharmaceuticals, and biotechnologies to maintain safe and high quality products for consumers. However, in recent years, food manufacturers seem to have forged ahead of the FDA's regulations and entered uncharted, unregulated areas. This paper examines the impact the FDA has on new food product development, particularly the impact on new technological food products and suggests the use of a team-based approach in evaluating and establishing regulations in the food industry.

Throwing light on straddling stocks of Illex argentinus: assessing fishing intensity with satellite imagery

Marine fisheries provide around 20% of animal protein consumed by man worldwide, but ineffective management can lead to commercial extinction of exploited stocks. Fisheries that overlap nationally controlled and high seas waters cause particular problems, as few management data are available for the high seas. The Argentinean short-finned squid, Illex argentinus, exemplifies such a "straddling stock". Here we demonstrate that light emitted by fishing vessels to attract squid can be detected via remote-sensing. Unlike conventional fisheries data, which are restricted by political boundaries, satellite imagery can provide a synoptic view of fishing activity in both regulated and unregulated areas. By using known levels of fishing effort in Falkland Islands waters to calibrate the images, we are able to estimate effort levels on the high seas, providing a more comprehensive analysis of the overall impact of fishing on the stock. This innovative tool for quantifying fishing activity across management boundaries has wide-ranging applications to squid fisheries worldwide.

Understanding Interorganizational Cooperation: Public-Private Collaboration in Regulating Financial Market Innovation

This paper examines how a collaborative effort between the private and public sectors, called the Derivatives Policy Group (DPG), helped shape current regulation of financial innovation. In 1994 and 1995, this group of six large financial firms developed procedures for risk management, internal controls, and reporting for largely unregulated areas of finance, in cooperation with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission and Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The process succeeded despite strong competition among the firms themselves and incentives for both the public and private sectors to resort to adversarial lobbying and legal challenges. The Derivatives Policy Group was a path-setting event in the development of flexible regulation of financial innovation that is now the norm for related policy making. The case is important in and of itself--the financial markets are a major concern of national and international economic policy--but here we treat it as an instance of a larger class of problems. Organizational science constantly encounters settings that involve numerous participants who compete or have histories of conflicts; who are interdependent, and collectively would gain (and even individually gain long term) by cooperating rather than competing on an issue; who fall under different governance systems; and who try as a group to design rules and principles governing their behavior. Four factors appear repeatedly in the research on the success or failure of such arrangements. These are (1) the initial dispositions toward cooperation, (2) the extant issues and incentives, (3) leadership, and (4) the number and variety of organizations involved. This paper focuses on how these factors shaped the development and consequences of the Derivatives Policy Group, and the general implications of this process for interorganizational cooperation.

Cost–benefit analysis of the use of TBT: the case for a treatment approach

The current climate of hostility towards the use of tributyltin (TBT) as an active ingredient in ship anti-fouling paint appears to be based on a very biased assessment of its environmental impact. While many national and international regulatory agencies are moving towards further restriction, and a complete ban is under active discussion, a number of factors appear to have been ignored. The economic impact of a ban on TBT when no adequate substitute exists could be substantial. Environmentally, consequences would include a substantial increase in the consumption of fossil fuel, with corresponding increases in carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide emissions; the construction of more vessels; the transfer of ship-building, ship-repairing and ship-breaking activities from well-regulated to unregulated or under-regulated areas in the developing world; and a shift from sea transport to less environmentally acceptable forms of transport. Experience in Europe and other parts of the developed world shows that existing restrictions, where they are properly enforced, are probably adequate to alleviate the environmental damage associated with TBT. Some existing legislation acts to inhibit the search for effective substitutes. The environmental benefits of TBT have been ignored. Little thought has been given to a technical, rather than a legislative solution to controlling TBT inputs to the environment. A method is described for treating TBT-contaminated wastewaters, which has been successfully tested in prototype at full scale. Legislative measures against TBT will do nothing to address the problem of the existing backlog of contaminated material, nor even to permit the IMO proposal for the removal of TBT from all ships by 2008 to be successfully concluded in an environmentally safe manner, since no provision has been made for the disposal of the existing TBT; most probably it will be dumped in environmentally sensitive, unregulated areas in the developing world.

Care Standards Act: the social-care perspective

The Care Standards Act will be the most significant legislative change since the National Assistance Act 1948. It will affect all care workers and their employers in all sectors, and formalize controls in previously unregulated areas of practice.