The consensus-building processes that characterize many environmental partnerships are often thwarted by cognitive conflict, which occurs when stakeholders have conflicting beliefs about the parameters of environmental problems and institutional performance. The author argues cognitive conflict results from stakeholders behaving like intuitive lawyers, who interpret uncertain situations in ways...

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) describes itself as " an independent federal agency that conducts foreign assistance and humanitarian aid to advance the political and economic interests of the United States " (http://www.usaid.gov). The explicit nationalism in this mission statement raises a problem that stretches far beyond any particular ideology: How should the...

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) evaluates causes of cancer with help from independent international experts in an open and transparent manner. Countries, research and regulatory agencies, and other organizations adopt IARC evaluations for communication of human cancer hazards, and for strategies to prevent cancer. Scientists worldwide endorse IARC cancer evaluations and p...

With different interests at stake, conservation is at the centre of power relations and negotiations over how best to manage a landscape, and is thus a potential source of conflicts, not only about how to manage the land, but also more importantly about what is just. In 2008 Sweden's National Park Plan, the creation of a national park in the area of Vålådalen-Sylarna-Helags in the county of Jäm...

Strategic information system planning (SISP) is one of the important steps in information system (IS) development. This proposed empirical study investigates factors leading to SISP success in a public organization. The research model and hypotheses were derived from two possible theories, agency theory and the political conflict model. The research methodology proposed uses the case study appr...

Tobacco control and the collateral damage of conflict of interest Anne MArie Todkill for The ediTors of open Medicine Anne Marie Todkill is an associate editor with Open Medicine. D iscussion of conflict of interest is not new to this journal; one variation on the theme concerned the appointment of a pharmaceutical industry executive to the governing council of the Canadian Institutes of Health...

CONFLICT OF INTEREST NONE DECLARED. SUMMARY Agency for Quality and Accreditation of Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (AKAZ) has developed computer based chronic disease register based on the accreditation standards in order to facilitate maintenance of chronic disease registers in the absence of electronic health records, and to speed up and simplify calculation for over 70 clinical indic...

How do we know how much control we have over our environment? The sense of agency refers to the feeling that we are in control of our actions, and that, through them, we can control our external environment. Thus, agency clearly involves matching intentions, actions, and outcomes. The present studies investigated the possibility that processes of action selection, i.e., choosing what action to ...

We analyze the regulation of firms that undertake socially risky activities and can reduce the probability of an accident inflicted on thirdparties by carrying out nonverifiable effort. Congress delegates the regulatory task to an Agency, though they may have have different preferences towards the industry. We determine the optimal level of discretion left by Congress to the Agency, showing a t...

A four-county Indiana survey of the vast majority (approximately 90%) of the attorneys and public agency caseworkers involved in court actions on child abuse cases revealed considerable conflict over each other's role. The survey replicated the method used in previous research, which had yielded distinctly positive and negative results. The author discusses particularities of the four-county ar...