Authors' institutional affiliations in Australian intellectual and developmental disabilities journals: a comparison of two decades

The generation of new knowledge through research can contribute significantly to the improvement of services for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. This study extends a previous study by Sigafoos, Roberts, and Couzens [Aust. N.Z.J. Dev. Disabil. 17 (1991) 331] by examining research productivity in intellectual and developmental disability in Australian journals for 1990-1999. Institutions that published research articles on intellectual and developmental disabilities in Australian journals in the 1990s were identified by noting the affiliations of authors. The most productive institutions were primarily universities in Australia and the United States of America. Publication trends in the decade of the 1990s are compared with trends of the previous decade (1980-1990). (C) 2003 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Localizing a global discipline - Designing new planning programs in Sri Lanka

In order to be relevant and useful in a fragmented developing country context, community and regional planning needs to shift away from the use of rigid tools to more flexible, adaptive approaches. An international review of planning curricula indicated a widespread consensus with respect to key competencies required of planners. This understanding was used in the development of new teaching programs at three Sri Lankan universities. Complementing the technical core knowledge areas, strong emphases on problem structuring, critical and strategic thinking, and the understanding of the political and institutional contexts appear to be crucial to making the agenda of planning for sustainable development more than a fashionable cliche. In order for these core areas to have relevance in a developing country context, however, planning curricula need to achieve a balance between local priorities and a global perspective.

The new age: Towards a market model

The problem of how the New Age may be defined is widely acknowledged among commentators. It is hard to delineate and does not fit easily into existing analytical categories. This paper will review how scholars have conceptualised the movement. It will discuss the problems inherent in attempting to specify its constituents, fix its limits, and characterise its organisational forms. The later sections advances the argument that some of its most distinctive characteristics may be accounted for by acknowledging the market dynamics at play in New Age milieux. It is proposed that the diffuse overall shape of the movement is the result of determinate commercial institutional arrangements.

Regional renaissance? New forms of governance in nonmetropolitan Australia

Since the Second World War, Australian governments have adopted various approaches to governing nonmetropolitan Australia. The authors profile three distinct approaches to governance characterised as (1) state-centred regionalism; (2) new localism; and (3) new forms of multifaceted regionalism. Although recent policy initiatives have been justified by the argument that the region is the most suitable scale for planning and development in nonmetropolitan Australia, in practice the institutional landscape is a hybrid of overlapping local, regional, and national scales of action. The authors compare this new, multifaceted, regionalism with the so-called 'new regionalism currently being promoted in Western Europe and North America. It is argued that new regionalism differs in quite important ways from the regionalism currently being fostered in Australia. In Australia, the centrality of sustainability principles, and the attempt to foster interdependence amongst stakeholders from the state, market, and civil society, have produced a layer of networked governance that is different from that overseas. It is argued that there is a triple bottom-line 'promise' in the Australian approach which differs from the Western Europe/North American model, and which has the potential to deliver enhanced economic, social, and environmental outcomes.

Forest logging and institutional thresholds in developing south-east Asian economies: A conceptual model

Many developing south-east Asian governments are not capturing full rent from domestic forest logging operations. Such rent losses are commonly related to institutional failures, where informal institutions tend to dominate the control of forestry activity in spite of weakly enforced regulations. Our model is an attempt to add a new dimension to thinking about deforestation. We present a simple conceptual model, based on individual decisions rather than social or forest planning, which includes the human dynamics of participation in informal activity and the relatively slower ecological dynamics of changes in forest resources. We demonstrate how incumbent informal logging operations can be persistent, and that any spending aimed at replacing the informal institutions can only be successful if it pushes institutional settings past some threshold. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.