Acknowledgements: We would like to thank the participants of the IVM-PBL review workshop on international biodiversity policies (29 November 2010, Utrecht) for their many helpful comments on an earlier version of this report. We would also like to thank Stefan van Esch and Marcel Kok for their comments on linking this report to the PBL study on Rethinking Global Biodiversity Strategies: Explori...

Changes in diet, reducing animal products and increasing consumption of vegetables can not only benefit human health and the overall use of land, but can also play a decisive role in the politics of climate change mitigation. In this sense, the Mediterranean diet (MD) is presented as a sustainable cultural model, respectful of the environment, whose adherence in Mediterranean countries should c...

‘...highly competitive with each other. Polluted by the internal power politics and the unsavoury characteristics seen in many big corporations, large aid agencies can be obsessed with raising money through their own appeal efforts. Media coverage as an end in itself is too often an aim of their activities. Marketing and branding have too high a profile. Perhaps worst of all, relief efforts in ...

Religious beliefs and institutions are central to Senegalese society and culture, and their outward and visible manifestations are omnipresent. A 2010 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life study found that 98 percent of Senegalese surveyed said that religion is ‘very important’ in their daily lives.1 Contemporary roles of religious leaders and communities are intricately interwoven into society...

To what extent do bond market reactions to an unexpected deficit shock depend on state-specific politics? To answer this question, we calculate German state bond spreads over government benchmark paper using information from Datastream for the period 2006-2010. We test for a variety of institutional and political factors. We find evidence that investors base risk perceptions on state specific e...

Emotions play an important role in many volitional processes. In this regard, the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) (Damasio et al., 1991; Damasio, 1994, 1996) has proven enormously influential in cognitive science. Despite having been formulated more than two decades ago, much related bibliography has appeared in recent years (e.g., Leland and Grafman, 2005; Reimann and Bechara, 2010; Olsen et a...

In a recent article, Gorik Ooms has drawn attention to the normative underpinnings of the politics of global health. We claim that Ooms is indirectly submitting to a liberal conception of politics by framing the politics of global health as a question of individual morality. Drawing on the theoretical works of Chantal Mouffe, we introduce a conflictual concept of the political as an alternative...

Substantial academic literature has shown that wartime service and veterans’ outcomes can vary widely over time space. However, in their aspirational book, Martin Crotty, Neil J. Diamant, Mark Edele aim to go beyond the specificities identify general patterns postwar experience of demobilized soldiers. More precisely, they seek understand where under what circumstances veterans reached an eleva...

The argument that representative democracies are experiencing an age of depoliticisation has become increasingly prominent. However, there has been too little reflection on the assumptions made about politics within the depoliticisation literature. This has led to a lack of precision in terms of how we identify (de)politicisation empirically and the grounds upon which we can normatively critiqu...

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