The Politics of Permaculture: Towards an Ecologically Situated Approach to Resource Policy and Governance

The contributions to environmental politics of Torgerson, Oelschlager, Dryzek, Harrè and others, converge in their respective acknowledgements that the shift towards an ‘ecologically situated’ approach to environmental policy, including resource governance, will require the emergence and consolidation of a new lingua franca of environmental discourse. In this paper, I suggest that an extrapolation of permaculture ethics may provide a gambit through which such a discourse may be assembled and organised. I examine six key signifying elements derived from Orr and Capra’s approach to ecological literacy – network, nested system, flow, cycle, development and dynamic balance – and explore the implications that these might have for resource governance and policy, including the (re)framing of assessment indicators, energy auditing, resource management and integrated planning and development.

Applying a Systems Approach to the Analysis of the Benefits of Conversion to Organic Production

Although the current level of organic production in industrialised countries amounts to little more than 1-2 percent, it is recognised that one of the major issues shaping agricultural output over the next several decades will be the demand for organic produce (Dixon et al. 2001). In Australia, the issues of healthy food and environmental concern contribute to increasing demand and market volumes for organic produce. However, in Indonesia, using more economical inputs for organic production is a supply-side factor driving organic production. For individual growers and processors, conversion from conventional to organic agriculture is often a challenging step, entailing a thorough revision of established practices and heightened market insecurity. This paper examines the potential for a systems approach to the analysis of the conversion process, to yield insights for household and community decisions. A framework for applying farming systems research to investigate the benefits of organic production in both Australia and Indonesia is discussed. The framework incorporates scope for farmer participation, crucial to the understanding of farming systems; analysis of production; and relationships to resources, technologies, markets, services, policies and institutions in their local cultural context. A systems approach offers the potential to internalise the external effects that may be constraining decisions to convert to organic production, and for the design of decision-making tools to assist households and the community. Systems models can guide policy design and serve as a mechanism for predicting the impact of changes to the policy and market environments. The increasing emphasis of farming systems research on community and environment in recent years is in keeping with the proposed application to organic production, processing and marketing issues. The approach will also facilitate the analysis of critical aspects of the Australian production, marketing and policy environment, and the investigation of these same features in an Indonesian context.

Towards a public health approach to parenting

There are various parenting, school and personal factors at play in determining a child’s risk of developing serious conduct problems. The temptation is therefore to conclude that “more is better than less”, but we think that has not been convincingly demonstrated. Some large-scale multi-risk-factor reduction approaches that include parenting, school and child-specific interventions with older school-aged children have shown promise but are complex to administer, costly to implement and have yet to show strong long-term outcomes. But in young children (toddler and preschool-aged children) there is strong evidence that social-learning-based parenting programmes are effective with a wide range of families from quite diverse socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds. We choose to focus on such programmes.

Approach to site, C House, Cooparoo

Looking uphill towards house from road.

Exploring Change in Neanderthal Behavioural Complexity: An Innovative Approach to the Study of Neanderthal Behaviour

Diachronic approaches provide potential for a more sophisticated framework within which to examine change in Neanderthal behavioural complexity using archaeological proxies such as symbolic artefacts, faunal assemblages and technology. Analysis of the temporal appearance and distribution of such artefacts and assemblages provide the basis for identifying changes in Neanderthal behavioural complexity in terms of symbolism, faunal extraction and technology respectively. Although changes in technology and faunal extraction were examined in the wider study, only the results of the symbolic study are presented below to illustrate the potential of the approach.

A state-contingent production approach to principal-agent problems with an application to point-source pollution control

Two basic representations of principal-agent relationships, the 'state-space' and 'parameterized distribution' formulations, have emerged. Although the state-space formulation appears more natural, analytical studies using this formulation have had limited success. This paper develops a state-space formulation of the moral-hazard problem using a general representation of production under uncertainty. A closed-form solution for the agency-cost problem is derived. Comparative-static results are deduced. Next we solve the principal's problem of selecting the optimal output given the agency-cost function. The analysis is applied to the problem of point-source pollution control. (C) 1998 Published by Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.

Quantum open-systems approach to current noise in resonant tunneling junctions

A quantum Markovian master equation is derived to describe the current noise in resonant tunneling devices. This equation includes both incoherent and coherent quantum tunneling processes. We show how to obtain the population master equation by adiabatic elimination of quantum coherences in the presence of elastic scattering. We calculate the noise spectrum for a double well device and predict subshot noise statistics for strong tunneling between the wells. The method is an alternative to Green's function methods and population master equations for very small coherently coupled quantum dots.