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In the beginning of the 20th century, many states in the USA, and especially California among them, implemented semi-direct democracy instruments that were directly inspired by the 1848 Swiss constitution—referendum, popular initiative, recall–to fight ext ...
Metropolitanization, through the upscaling of urban systems and lifestyles, changes the political patterns of urban areas. Many models of governance have been proposed both to improve the quality and optimize efficiency of urban policies. However surveys s ...
In this chapter I expose how direct democracy instruments based on the ballot (referendum, popular initiative, recall), as opposed to assembly based direct democracy, have developed in Switzerland and have been adopted by more than 20 US states as an answe ...
The context is the URBANGENE project which aims at estimating the impact of urbanization on biodiversity using genetic information. The paper discusses the opportunities to involve citizens in a conservation process through the development of a participato ...
Biological communities often occur in spatially structured habitats where connectivity directly affects dispersal and metacommunity processes. Recent theoretical work suggests that dispersal constrained by the connectivity of specific habitat structures, s ...
A synthesis is presented highlighting the importance of hydrologic variables and dynamics to biodiversity patterns. The focus of this paper is the key hydrologic controls crucial towards quantifying the impacts of climate changes on the distribution of spe ...
My dissertation, ‘Periodicity and Rural Urban Dynamics’, hypothesizes that the simultaneous experience of strongly contrasting sensations is pleasurable, and that ‘abrupt urbanism’ can enhance both rural and urban experience. This article investigates the ...
The interdisciplinary project Resilient Rivers links research in hydraulic engineering and ecology to explore processes and to evaluate measures related to river restoration. The partners from four different Swiss research institutions together with the ...
The sustainable production of bioenergy is vital to avoiding negative impacts on environmental goods such as climate, soil, water, and especially biodiversity. We propose three key issues that should be addressed in any biodiversity risk-mitigation strateg ...
Based on the 'universal' values of economic development, democratic governance and cultural diversity promoted by UNESCO, the official policy of the Federation of Malaysia, known as Wawasan 2020 (Vision 2020), promotes modernization with an emphasis on dem ...
