This paper examines the role of language policy and needs assessments in the provision of public services to regional minority and immigrant language speakers in the UK and Finland. Semi-structured interviews with service providers in Helsinki, Rovaniemi, Manchester, and Cardiff revealed how language policy and language needs are conceptualised…

The topic of the Federal Reserve's (the Fed's) implementation of monetary policy has a significant presence in economics textbooks. Unfortunately, as the Fed purposefully shifted the way it implements monetary policy to an environment with ample reserves in the banking system, many textbooks have not kept up. The authors walk through the key…

The notion of the common good underlies much policy making in geography. There are two reasons for evaluating geography's impact on the common good for the university curriculum. First, by working within the various theoretical paradigms that have influenced policy, students will learn to argue from different perspectives such as social democracy…

Background: A robust evidence base is needed to develop sustainable cross-party solutions for public housing to promote well-being. The provision of public housing is politically contentious in New Zealand, as in many liberal democracies. Depending on the government, policies oscillate between encouraging sales of public housing stock and reducing…

Following an interpretative approach this paper investigates the role of knowledge orders, understood as settings which attribute relevance to specific expertise. The changing patterns of incorporation of expertise in policy formulation as well as public justification are analysed for German and British labour market policy. From a comparative…

Web-based geographic information system (GIS) technology, or web-based GIS, offers many opportunities for public planners and Extension educators who have limited GIS backgrounds or resources. However, investigation of its use in planning has been limited. The study described here examined the use of web-based GIS by public planning agencies. A…

Research on long-term media coverage of environmental issues has focused predominantly on English-speaking industrialized countries and on single isolated topics. This article presents a comparative analysis of the Finnish newspaper coverage of climate change and eutrophication from 1990-2014. The coverage of eutrophication showed an annual cycle…

In this two-paper dissertation, I examine U.S. Census data from the Current Population Survey Merged Outgoing Rotating Groups to understand how undocumented-student high-school-diploma, college-enrollment, associate's-degree, and bachelor's-degree attainment odds have been impacted by the Illegal Immigrant Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act…

The objective of this paper is to conduct comparative analysis about the views and practices of policy makers and researchers on the use of health systems evidence in policy making in selected Eastern Mediterranean countries. We analysed data from two self-reported surveys, one targeted at policy makers and the other at researchers. Results show a…

Much of the evidence translation literature focuses narrowly on the use of evidence in the initial policy formulation stages, and downplays the crucial role of institutions and the inherently political nature of policy making. More recent approaches acknowledge the importance of institutional and political factors, but make no attempt to…

One of the difficulties in teaching global sustainability in the introductory political science classes is the different emphases placed on this concept and the absence of the consensus on where the overall balance between environmental protection, economic development, and social justice should reside. Like many fuzzy concepts with which students…

In the contemporary United States, marriage is closely related to money. Men and (perhaps to a lesser extent) women with more education, higher incomes, larger stocks of wealth, and more stable employment are more likely to marry than are people in more precarious economic positions. But is this relationship truly causal? That is, does economic…

The implementation of the Green Skills Agreement ratified by the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) in 2010 provides the national policy context for this analysis of skills for sustainability. Data from three different but complementary studies provide powerful insight into the attitudes and perceptions of young people who are studying, or…

Quality of urban life (QOUL) has become an important field within urban studies. The increased level of attention to this topic is due to the increasing importance of QoL studies in monitoring public policies and in the role they can play as effective tools in urban management and planning. The main objective of this study is to measure the QOUL…

This study analyzes degrees of differences between the private and public sectors of Polish higher education. It finds them to be strong: Polish private institutions function very differently from Polish public institutions and these differences correspond with those found in the literature on higher education elsewhere in the world. Polish…