农业法的全球性挑战与回应

农业面临着全球化不断推进、粮食安全和食品质量保证、世界人口增加、全球环境问题四方面的挑战.农业法有必要对此予以回应,为可持续农业发展创建具有强制力和可靠性的法律框架,支持和保障农民务农知识的提高和农业科技的发展,对第三次农业革命进行法律调整,解决全球农业法支离破碎的问题.由于农业全球化,硬法和软法在多层次的农业法体系中作用重要,食品安全不仅需要国内法规范,还需要构建国际规范.行之有效的全球食品安全法律体系尚未形成,应该建立对全球粮食安全具有约束力的目标和原则.对中德法律制度进行比较研究,不仅有利于这一法律体系的构建,还有助于克服全球农业法的支离破碎.     

Diagnostics for multivariate imputations

Summary.  We consider three sorts of diagnostics for random imputations: displays of the completed data, which are intended to reveal unusual patterns that might suggest problems with the imputations, comparisons of the distributions of observed and imputed data values and checks of the fit of observed data to the model that is used to create the imputations. We formulate these methods in terms of sequential regression multivariate imputation, which is an iterative procedure in which the missing values of each variable are randomly imputed conditionally on all the other variables in the completed data matrix. We also consider a recalibration procedure for sequential regression imputations. We apply these methods to the 2002 environmental sustainability index, which is a linear aggregation of 64 environmental variables on 142 countries.     

Competitive renaissance through digital transformation

Dramatic health, environmental, and social-related challenges put pressure on firms to rethink their strategies and growth paths. Is a digital-enabled transformation able to help firms cope with these challenges and drive a competitive renaissance of our economic system? Are extant theories and concepts able to interpret the digital transformation? This management focus section aims to advance a relevant and impactful research agenda in the area of “business strategy and digitalization” through 4 contributions – both conceptual and empirical – that contribute to the understanding of the so-called “digital transformation” and its implications for both scholars and practitioners.     

Seeking urban sustainability on the world stage

Nearly any introduction to the ideas and actions of sustainable development includes a mention of the role played in launching the global movement by the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. International forums have been a major vehicle for the pursuit of sustainability subsequent to 1992, as well, but little attention has been paid to the contribution that these global gatherings have made to the advancement of sustainability goals. This article takes up this question, with a focus on the role that major global gatherings may be playing in the pursuit of urban sustainability, specifically. To this end, we examine outcomes from the United Nations Habitat II Forum (1996, Istanbul), the World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002, Johannesburg), the World Social Forum (2001–present, Porto Alegre), and the World Urban Forum 3 (2006, Vancouver), based on reports in the scholarly literature and, in the latter case, based on our own experience as urbanists in the host city of the World Urban Forum 3. For comparative purposes, we include in our review reflections on the contribution made by a United Nations effort towards sustainability, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), made without an accompanying major global gathering. While we do not find evidence of ‘Rio-scale’ success among either the forums or in the case of the MDGs, we report on process and structural innovations made with each forum as well as common critiques of all of them. A primary contribution that all the forums have made to the advancement of urban sustainability has been more clearly differentiating among sustainability's very different types of proponents and charting the landscape of barriers and opportunities for paradigm change towards sustainable urban futures.     

Geographical indications, terroir, and socioeconomic and ecological sustainability: The case of tequila

In this paper, we use the case of tequila to examine the potential for geographical indications (GIs) to contribute to socioeconomic and environmental sustainability. GIs are place-based names (e.g., Champagne, Roquefort) that convey the geographical origin, as well as the cultural and historical identity, of agricultural products. The GI for tequila was established by the Mexican government in 1974, making it the oldest GI, and one of the best-recognized, outside of Europe. Here, we examine the social, economic, and ecological impacts that the agave–tequila industry has had on one community in tequila's region of origin, the town of Amatitán. We show that persistent cycles of surplus and shortage of agave and changing production relations in the agave–tequila industry have led to: (1) economic insecurity among farm households; (2) increased use of chemical inputs, at the expense of more labor-intensive cultivation practices; and (3) overall declines in fertilizer application, especially during periods in which there is a surplus of agave. We argue that the negative effects of the agave–tequila industry on the local economy and environment are due to the failure of the GI for tequila to value the ways in which the terroir of tequila's region of origin have contributed to its specific properties. We conclude by using this case to discuss more generally the relationship between the protection of place-based products (known collectively as geographical indications) and social and environmental sustainability.     

Municipal Budget Management and the Generation of Urban Sprawl. A Case Study of the Lombardy Region (Italy)

ABSTRACT

The paper describes one of the Italian sprawl drivers: the circle triggered by the use of urban charges to solve budget problems. From 2005 to 2018, Italian municipalities could use urban charges to solve normal budget problems: they could plan new urban areas to provide new urban charges, new building and services, and they could manage old and new services at the expense of normal budget. The planning of unnecessary urban areas was effectively influenced by budget problems. The paper illustrates this issue during a period without open data sources in order to improve land management and environmental sustainability.     

农民专业合作行为的广义经济学分析

一定时期内,任何经济人的所有经济行为的最终结果,都会形成一个以自我为中心,以有效经济利益为半径的经济利益圆周;经济人的经济利益圆周范围不断扩大以至相互重叠,是合作行为产生的客观经济基础。农民专业合作行为产生的重要前提是家庭土地承包经营的充分发展,并始终以此为基础;农民专业合作的经济效率来源于参与者的合作收益,但必须保证合作收益大于合作成本;农民的合作净收益必须留存于合作组织内部,合理、均衡的利益反馈机制是保证其可持续运行的关键。     

Humanizing strategy

In this article, we apply our latest thinking on knowledge to provide insights on how to reconceptualize strategy to cope with a VUCA world, epitomized recently by COVID-19. We demonstrate that business leaders must draw on phronesis, or practical wisdom, for strategy to become more future-oriented, society-focused, dynamic, and human-centric. Using in-depth case studies, we show how companies will survive in the long run if they start with a moral purpose, and end by offering value to customers, contributing to society, living in harmony with nature, and creating a new and better future. We came up with six practices that enable business leaders to create new and better futures, citing evidences from neuroscience. We conclude that humans should be at the center of strategy, driving future-making with the help of digital-led automation. Reconceptualizing strategy based on this “inside-out” approach, the reward to the company is resilience, longevity, and sustainability.     

Firm-nonprofit collaboration: Explaining the rationale behind firms’ cross-sector partner choices

Cross-sector partnerships between firms and nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are emerging at an unprecedented rate to address sustainability issues. Extant research on cross-sector partnerships explains the firms' motivations to engage in partnerships but little is known about what drives the firms' partner choice. We build on firm-firm alliance research, differentiating between network-reinforcing and network-broadening strategies for finding partners. Based on a qualitative study with 33 experts from 17 frontrunner companies and 14 partnering NPOs, as well as secondary data, we assess the trade-offs between these two strategies and explore firms’ partner search and selection decisions. We advance cross-sector partnership research by proposing three drivers to explain why firms in our sample preferred to reinforce (rather than to broaden) their networks when forming additional cross-sector partnerships for sustainability. Moreover, we propose two conditions to explain why frontrunner firms often rely on opportunity-driven (rather than search-driven) partnership formation. These insights shed light on the type of formation strategy used in the context of cross-sector partnerships for sustainability.     

Improving sustainability: An international evolutionary framework

As emerging markets develop, foreign firms are being viewed less and less as providers of capital and/or technology, and more as integral parts of society in general, with much greater responsibilities that stem largely from their multinational roles. Recognizing these pressures and the increasing interaction between multinationals and societal institutions, we first briefly review the literature on role, stakeholder, and institutional theories, to develop a framework to improve our understanding of multinational sustainability. We next develop a three-stage model of the stages of societal development in general, and subsequently apply these stages to the development of China from 1978 to the present. We suggest that these changes have resulted in changing expectations of multinationals regarding their appropriate roles within China. We conclude by discussing lessons from our model for researchers, educators and practitioners.