The World Heritage vs. Local Comnuty : identifying the sources of conflicts

The presented work is an essay rather than a scientific dissertation. The author wants to put an impact on the source of conflicts regarding the complex subject of heritage management and conservation in comparison with the local needs and the given context. The paper attempts to show the role of local communities and their cooperation with authorities as well as the effects of such cooperation. The area of research comprises the problems arising in the field of implementing external rules on the local field, challenges appearing regarding the needs of local communities and the efforts of official authorities trying to implement the principles of the conventions. The problems arise when local communities display the lack of understanding and do not share the common idea of heritage conservation. This is caused mainly by the decreasing possibilities of comfortable life. The author tries to identify the main and wrongful approaches as ‘Gone with the Wind’, ‘The Prince and The Pauper’, ‘Heart of Darkness’ or ‘Scarlet letter’. The focus will be put to explain what the areas are where a mutual misunderstanding arise and why all parts to the problem present different points of view. What creates a value? Is it a heritage object or maybe the other values need a stronger protection? When the general duty and the need to protect the heritage is regarded as a controversy and when it is considered as a value within a given community? The international public interest in heritage protection is often regarded as an attempt to diminish the sovereign power of the community and provokes severe controversies and tensions. The major problem envisaged today seems to be the massive and increasing urbanisation and the destruction of the vestiges still existing of traditional cultures, when we consider century urban post-industrial districts of Upper Silesia in Poland, the medieval cities in Western Europe, the traditional nomad Masaya villages in Kenya or the remains of vanished cultures in various regions of Asia. The preferred platform of cooperation between the parts of the conflict includes divergent needs, beliefs and practices of communities and the possible fields of reconciling the abovementioned. Chosen examples of the best practices considering mutual cooperation will be underlined.

Determinants of internal and external R&D offshoring: Evidence from Spanish firms

This paper analyzes the determinants of R&D offshoring of Spanish firms using information from the Panel of Technological Innovation. We find that being an exporter, international technological cooperation, continuous R&D engagement, applying for patents, being a for-eign subsidiary, and firm size are factors that positively affect the decision to offshore R&D. In addition, we find that a lack of financing is an obstacle relatively more important for inde-pendent firms than for firms that belong to business groups. For these latter, we also obtain that the factors that influence the decision to offshore R&D differ depending on whether the firm purchases the R&D services within the group or through the market: a higher degree of importance assigned to internal sources of information for innovation as compared to mar-ket sources increases (decreases) the probability of R&D offshoring only through the group (market).