International Climate Finance and its Influence on Fairness and Policy

27 p.

Economics of Energy and Climate Change: Origins, Developments and Growth

27 p.

Pretty good governance: balancing policy drivers and stakeholder interests in developing fisheries ecosystem plans

The central research question that this thesis addresses is whether there is a significant gap between fishery stakeholder values and the principles and policy goals implicit in an Ecosystem Approach to Fisheries Management (EAFM). The implications of such a gap for fisheries governance are explored. Furthermore an assessment is made of what may be practically achievable in the implementation of an EAFM in fisheries in general and in a case study fishery in particular. The research was mainly focused on a particular case study, the Celtic Sea Herring fishery and its management committee, the Celtic Sea Herring Management Advisory Committee (CSHMAC). The Celtic Sea Herring fishery exhibits many aspects of an EAFM and the fish stock has successfully recovered to healthy levels in the past 5 years. However there are increasing levels of governance related conflict within the fishery which threaten the future sustainability of the stock. Previous research on EAFM governance has tended to focus either on higher levels of EAFM governance or on individual behaviour but very little research has attempted to link the two spheres or explore the relationship between them. Two main themes within this study aimed to address this gap. The first was what role governance could play in facilitating EAFM implementation. The second theme concerned the degree of convergence between high-level EAFM goals and stakeholder values. The first method applied was governance benchmarking to analyse systemic risks to EAFM implementation. This found that there are no real EU or national level policies which provide stakeholders or managers with clear targets for EAFM implementation. The second method applied was the use of cognitive mapping to explore stakeholders understandings of the main ecological, economic and institutional driving forces in the Celtic Sea Herring fishery. The main finding from this was that a long-term outlook can and has been incentivised through a combination of policy drivers and participatory management. However the fundamental principle of EAFM, accounting for ecosystem linkages rather than target stocks was not reflected in stakeholders cognitive maps. This was confirmed in a prioritisation of stakeholders management priorities using Analytic Hierarchy Process which found that the overriding concern is for protection of target stock status but that wider ecosystem health was not a priority for most management participants. The conclusion reached is that moving to sustainable fisheries may be a more complex process than envisioned in much of the literature and may consist of two phases. The first phase is a transition to a long-term but still target stock focused approach. This achievable transition is mainly a strategic change, which can be incentivised by policies and supported by stakeholders. In the Celtic Sea Herring fishery, and an increasing number of global and European fisheries, such transitions have contributed to successful stock recoveries. The second phase however, implementation of an ecosystem approach, may present a greater challenge in terms of governability, as this research highlights some fundamental conflicts between stakeholder perceptions and values and those inherent in an EAFM. This phase may involve the setting aside of fish for non-valued ecosystem elements and will require either a pronounced mind-set and value change or some strong top-down policy incentives in order to succeed. Fisheries governance frameworks will need to carefully explore the most effective balance between such endogenous and exogenous solutions. This finding of low prioritisation of wider ecosystem elements has implications for rights based management within an ecosystem approach, regardless of whether those rights are individual or collective.

Empirical Evidence on Relationships between Ex Ante Innovation Pursuit and Post-M&A Performance in the Vietnamese M&A Industry, 2005-2012

This research aims to communicate new results of empirical investigations to learn about the relationship between determination of controlling an acquired firm’s capital, assets and brand versus its capability of innovation and ex post performance of the rising Vietnamese M&A industry in the 2005-2012 period. The analysis employs a categorical data sample, consisting of 212 M&A cases reported by various information sources, and performs a number of logistic regressions with significant results as follows. Firstly, the overall relationship between pre-M&A pursuit’s determination on acquiring resources and performance of the post-M&A performance is found significant. There exist profound effects of a ‘size matters’ strategy in M&A ex post performance. When there is an overwhelming ‘resources acquiring’ strategy, the innovation factor’s explanatory power becomes negligible. Secondly, for negative performance of post-M&A operations, the emphasis on both capital base and asset size, and the brand value at the time of the M&A pursuit is the major explanation in the post-M&A period. So does the absence of innovation as a goal in the pre-M&A period. These two insights together are useful in careful M&A planning. Lastly, expensive pre-M&A expenditures tend to adversely affect the post-M&A performance. As a general conclusion, this study shows that innovation can be an important factor to pursue in M&A transitions, together with the need to emphasize and find capable and willing human capital, rather than a capital base (equity or debt) and existing values of the acquired brands.

Private equity: financial investors, public services, and employment

The report surveys the activity of private equity and other financial investors in the water, waste and healthcare sectors in Europe. It includes the appraisal of a WEF study on employment effects.

'Strange Visitor From Another Planet': Genre, Corporate Identity and the Arrival of American Telefantasy on British Television

While the BBC had been broadcasting television Science Fiction productions from as early as 1938, and Horror since the start of television in 1936, American Telefantasy had no place on British television until ITV’s broadcast of Adventures of Superman (1952-1958) in 1956. It would be easy to assign this absence to the avoidance of popular American programming, but this would ignore the presence of Western and adventure serials imported from the US and Canada for monopoly British television. Similarly, it would be inaccurate to suggest that these imports were purely purchased as thrilling fare to appease a child audience, as it was the commercial ITV that was first to broadcast the more adult-orientated Science Fiction Theatre (1955-7) and Inner Sanctum (1954). This article builds on the work of Paul Rixon and Rob Leggott to argue that these imports were used primarily to supply relatively cheap broadcast material for the new channel, but that they also served to appeal to the notion of spectacular entertainment attached to the new channel through its own productions, such as The Invisible Man (1958-1959) and swashbucklers such as The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-60). However, the appeal was not just to the exciting, but also to the transatlantic, with ITV embracing this conception of America as a modern place of adventure through its imports and its creation of productions for export, incorporating an American lead into The Invisible Man and drawing upon an (inexpensive) American talent pool of blacklisted screenwriters to provide a transatlantic style and relevance to its own adventure series. Where the BBC used its imported serials as filler directed at children, ITV embraced this transatlantic entertainment as part of its identity and differentiation from the BBC.