Community development and control in a state-local partnership in Aotearoa New Zealand

This paper is a case study of an attempt, using community developmentmethods, by local members of a state-local partnership to gainmore governance control in the face of central government dominance.The process highlighted in this case study was a community visioningexercise that built on existing networks at a local level todevelop the higher degree of active community involvement requiredto achieve more autonomy to meet felt community needs throughoutthe local district. The resources activated through the community development processenabled the partnership to successfully challenge central governmentdominance and develop local initiatives. It also raised issuesaround the autonomous development of mana whenua (the indigenouspeople of that place) initiatives and those of outlying ruralcommunities. The overall conclusion is one that supports a strategicapproach to local empowerment through the community developmentprocesses of enhancing local interactive multi-stakeholder networksand using leverage to negotiate change, in this case, by exploitingseemingly endemic structural weaknesses of the central government.     

Regional listening forums: an examination of the methodologies used by the child welfare league of America and lambda legal to highlight the experiences of LGBTQ youth in care

In 2002, the Child Welfare League of America (CWLA) and the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund began Fostering Transitions: CWLA/Lambda Joint Initiative to Support LGBTQ Youth and Adults Involved with the Child Welfare System. To document the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (LGBTQ) youth, as well as identify strategies for systems improvement, initiative staff associated with the joint initiative conducted a series of Regional Listening Forums in 13 cities in the United States. More than 500 participants attended the forums, representing 22 states from every region in the country. Participants included former and current youth in care as well as the adults who work most closely with them. This article focuses on the methodologies on which the forums were developed and conducted. I realized that being gay is not my problem. It's their problem. I see it as a social disease. I try not to get involved in negative communities. But I do try to teach them. I'd rather teach them than ignore them. Otherwise, the ignorance will continue and nothing will ever be done about it.     

Climate change knowledge influences attitude to mitigation via efficacy beliefs

Theories proposing climate change apathy is explained by inadequate knowledge do not account for why many informed and concerned Americans fail to act. While correlations between knowledge, efficacy for climate change, and attitude to mitigation have been observed, few studies have examined efficacy for climate change as a mediator. This study aimed to investigate the influence of specific climate change knowledge on attitude to mitigation via efficacy beliefs. A cross-sectional survey of 205 US adults recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk assessed participants’ climate change knowledge, efficacy for climate change, and attitude to mitigation. Indirect effects of self-efficacy for climate change were observed in three mediation models, suggesting efficacy for climate change explains some of the relationship between specific climate change knowledge and attitude to mitigation. The findings suggest risk communication can motivate pro-environmental attitudes with interventions that deliver information about climate change and develop efficacy for mitigation behavior.     

Fiscal Foresight and Information Flows

News—or foresight—about future economic fundamentals can create rational expectations equilibria with non‐fundamental representations that pose substantial challenges to econometric efforts to recover the structural shocks to which economic agents react. Using tax policies as a leading example of foresight, simple theory makes transparent the economic behavior and information structures that generate non‐fundamental equilibria. Econometric analyses that fail to model foresight will obtain biased estimates of output multipliers for taxes; biases are quantitatively important when two canonical theoretical models are taken as data generating processes. Both the nature of equilibria and the inferences about the effects of anticipated tax changes hinge critically on hypothesized information flows. Different methods for extracting or hypothesizing the information flows are discussed and shown to be alternative techniques for resolving a non‐uniqueness problem endemic to moving average representations.     

Modeling the Audit Opinions Issued to Bankrupt Companies: A Two‐stage Empirical Analysis*

Many observers are dissatisfied with the accounting profession's ability to warn the public of upcoming bankruptcy filings. Since regulators and users tend to treat an unmodified audit opinion as a “clean bill of health,” they do not expect the business to fail in the near future. Research has shown that more often than not, auditors end up letting users down when it comes to predicting bankruptcy filings with audit opinions. Although auditors assert they are not responsible for predicting future events, it is very clear that their opinion decision is evaluated, at least in part, based on events that occur after the audit report date. The interesting and logical next step is to find out how companies exit bankruptcy. Do they liquidate or reorganize? Successful reorganization may, in the end, exonerate auditors and preserve their role as an early warning device. The opinion prediction model developed in the paper introduces a new bankruptcy resolution variable that proxies for the auditor's prognosis of the ultimate disposition of the soon‐to‐be‐bankrupt company. Using a sample of bankruptcy filings between 1982 and 1992, we find that auditors do not seem to be able to predict filings or resolution. Our tests of bankruptcy resolution support what auditors have been arguing for years: that they are not clairvoyant with respect to a client's future.