This article presents the outcome of research aimed at assisting governments in meeting their commitments and legal obligations for sustainable fisheries, based on increasing evidence that global fisheries are in crisis. The article assesses the effectiveness of the existing legal and institutional framework for high seas living resources. It focuses on: (1) the role of regional fisheries manag...

Austerity and fiscal crisis make the search for cost saving reforms in local government more critical. While cost savings from privatization have frequently proven ephemeral, inter-municipal cooperation has been a relatively understudied reform. We analyze the literature on cost savings under cooperation and find savings are dependent on (1) the cost structure of public services, particularly t...

This chapter discusses strategies aimed at regional-economic structural change in the German Ruhrgebiet. The Ruhrgebiet used to be the largest industrial area in Western-Europe. After the crisis in the coal and steel industry the region pursued re-industrialisation policies in the 1960s and 1970s. These attempts were largely unsuccesful. Therefore, since the 1980s the involved actors gradually ...

Although diversity-stability relationships have been extensively studied in local ecosystems, the global biodiversity crisis calls for an improved understanding of these relationships in a spatial context. Here, we use a dynamical model of competitive metacommunities to study the relationships between species diversity and ecosystem variability across scales. We derive analytic relationships un...