The Forest for the Trees: A Comparative Analysis of Urban Forestry Regimes in Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon

This research project examines the development and implementation of municipal-level urban forestry policy in the cities of Seattle, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. The research examines the issue-specific context in which both developed, both broadly as an emerging area of scientific research and in the context of each state. Next, through a synthesis of interviews and analysis, it traces the development of each city’s approach and examines both its efficacy and the significant factors that emerged through the course of research as having made a significant impact on overall outcomes.

Time-series Luminance Distribution Maps: implementation of annual daylight simulation methods for occupant visual comfort analysis

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Drought policy: a graphical analysis

The standard approach to modelling production under uncertainty has relied on the concept of the stochastic production function. In the present paper, it is argued that a state-contingent production model is more flexible and realistic. The model is applied to the problem of drought policy.

The International Consortium on Mental Health Policy and Services: objectives, design and project implementation

The concept of the burden of disease, introduced and estimated for a broad range of diseases in the World Bank report of 1993 illustrated that mental and neurological disorders not only entail a higher burden than cancer, but are responsible, in developed and developing countries, for more than 15% of the total burden of all diseases. As a consequence, over the past decade, mental disorders have ranked increasingly highly on the international agenda for health. However, the fact that mental health and nervous system disorders are now high on the international health agenda is by no means a guarantee that the fate of patients suffering from these disorders in developing countries will improve. In most developing countries the treatment gap for mental and neurological disorders is still unacceptably high. To address this problem, an international network of collaborating institutions in low-income countries has been set up. The establishment and the achievements of this network-the International Consortium on Mental Health Policy and Services-are reported. Sixteen institutions in developing countries collaborate (supported by a small number of scientific resource centres in industrialized nations) in projects on applied mental health systems research. Over a two-year period, the network produced the key elements of a national mental health policy; provided tools and methods for assessing a country's current mental health status (context, needs and demands, programmes, services and care and outcomes); established a global network of expertise, i.e., institutions and experts, for use by countries wishing to reform their mental health policy, services and care; and generated guidelines and examples for upgrading mental health policy with due regard to the existing mental health delivery system and demographic, cultural and economic factors.

Does pharmacogenomics provide an ethical challenge to the utilisation of cost-effectiveness analysis by public health systems?

Pharmacogenomics promotes an understanding of the genetic basis for differences in efficacy or toxicity of drugs in different individuals. Implementation of the outcomes of pharmacogenomic research into clinical practice presents a number of difficulties for healthcare. This paper aims to highlight one of the Unique ethical challenges which pharmacogenomics presents for the utilisation of cost-effectiveness analysis by public health systems. This paper contends that pharmacogenomics provides a challenge to fundamental principles which underlie most systems for deciding which drugs should be publicly subsidised. Pharmacogenomics brings into focus the conflict between equality and utility in the context of using cost-effectiveness analysis to aid distribution of a limited national drug budget.

Economic Incentives to Conserve Wildlife on Private Lands: Analysis and Policy

Some believe that provision of private property rights in wildlife on private land provides a powerful economic incentive for nature conservation because it enables property owners to market such wildlife or its attributes. If such marketing is profitable, private landholders will conserve the wildlife concerned and its required habitat. But land is not always most profitably used for exploitation of wildlife, and many economic values of wildlife (such as non-use economic values) cannot be marketed. The mobility of some wildlife adds to the limitations of the private-property approach. While some species may be conserved by this approach, it is suboptimal as a single policy approach to nature conservation. Nevertheless, it is being experimented with, in the Northern Territory of Australia where landholders had a possibility of harvesting on their properties a quota of eggs and chicks of red-tailed black cockatoos for commercial sale. This scheme was expected to provide an incentive to private landholders to retain hollow trees essential for the nesting of these birds but failed. This case and others are analysed. Despite private-property failures, the long-term survival of some wildlife species depends on their ability to use private lands without severe harassment, either for their migration or to supplement their available resources, for example, the Asian elephant. Nature conservation on private land is often a useful, if not essential, supplement to conservation on public lands. Community and public incentives for such conservation are outlined.

Understanding policy convergence in Britain and Germany: towards a framework for analysis

This introduction considers reasons why public policies might be expected to converge between Britain and Germany, arguing that the inter-related forces of globalisation, Europeanisation, policy transfer (in various guises) and the election of centre-left governance in 1997 and 1998 could be expected to lead to such convergence. It then outlines important reasons why such convergence may not occur, due to the radically different institutional settings, as well as 'path dependence' and the resilience of established institutions all playing a role in continuing divergence in a number of important areas of public policy.