Changes in the Local Territorial Government Organization and Their Effect on Municipal Budgets (by the Example of Trans-Baikal Region)

The current reform of local governments in Russia is a process of optimization, consolidation and changing the territorial government organization, which corresponds to global trends in searching for a relevant and effective local territorial governance scheme. The new wave of interest to this process in the RF has been caused by establishing a new type of municipality, namely, municipal district. The article studies the problem of changes in local territorial governance organization in Russia and in Trans-Baikal region, in particular, as well as the effect of these changes on municipal budgets. The analytical calculations are based on the data from The Federal State Statistic Service of RF; the time lag for analyzing the local territorial governance organization is the period of 2007–2020, and 2016–2020 — for analyzing the budget funding of the transformed municipalities in Trans-Baikal region. The results of the study show that the common trends of consolidation of municipalities in Russia became evident only in 2020. According to the analysis of income and expenditures per capita, the territorial transformation of municipality influences the budget relations on the municipal level. Basing on the results of the study, the author proves the necessity of conducting a complex analysis before taking a decision to change a local territorial governance organization in order to build up the financial base of the municipalities.

Finances of the Nation: The Evolution of Health Expenditures in Canada, 1926-2019

In this article, Livio Di Matteo provides an overview of expenditures on health care in Canada over the long term. He examines changes in the size, relative importance, growth, and composition of health expenditures, with an additional focus on provincial-territorial government spending since the 1970s. Di Matteo links the evolution of health-care spending to factors affecting the demand for and supply of health services, including income, demographic changes, technological development, cost, policy, and public finances.

SOCIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS — THE ESSENTIAL BASIS OF EMPLOYMENT INSTITUTIONS

The category of employment is considered from the point of view of the theory that explains the essence of employment, and from the point of view of the practice of employment management, focused on creating the fundamental foundations for regulating the processes occurring in the labor markets. From a theoretical standpoint, employment is presented in the form of an element of a conceptual system that includes employment itself, unemployment, the labor market, which are in contradictory dialectical interactions among themselves, reflected in social and labor relations. From the point of view of practice, “employment”, “unemployment” and “labor market” are considered as a system of objects of managerial influences, interconnected in such a way that the impact on one of them causes changes in the content of other objects of the system. Such relationships are due to the emerging within the territorial entities social and labor relations. The article proposes to create employment institutions in the structure of territorial government, the methodological basis of which should be social and labor relations.

Regional Landscape Planning and Local Planning. Insights from the Italian Context

Landscape has acquired great importance in the urban and territorial policies of European countries after the European Landscape Convention. Italy has a long tradition in the protection of landscape and cultural heritage, characterised by a particular attention to the history and the identity culture of the communities. The main rule in this field, the Code of Cultural Heritage and Landscape of 2004 (Urbani Code), refers to a mix of environmental, cultural, and social factors belonging to different types of natural and urban landscapes that Regional Landscape Plans have to identify, sharing with local communities. The most important innovation concerns the attempt to overcome the binding and regulatory approach, only focused on protection constraints, in order to generate high awareness about the identity value of landscape and to encourage a more democratic community participation in the landscape policies. The ineffectiveness of landscape policies is often due to the lack of sharing of the landscape vision and planning approaches established at regional level, with local authorities and settled communities. This paper reflects on the topic of inter-institutional collaboration between national, regional, and local authorities, by focusing on the process of adaptation of urban local plans to the regional landscape plans and comparing different regional contexts. The article highlights a strong delay in the approval of regional landscape plans and a relevant inter-institutional conflict in the co-planning phase with the national authority, leading to the ineffectiveness of landscape plans in the transfer of regional landscape planning guidelines to the local landscape scale, with relevant consequences on territorial government, between conservative measures and transformation drivers.

Monitoring, Managing, and Communicating Risk of Harmful Algal Blooms (HABs) in Recreational Resources across Canada

Globally, harmful algal blooms (HABs) are on the rise, as is evidence of their toxicity. The impacts associated with blooms, however, vary across Nation states, as do the strategies and protocols to assess, monitor, and manage their occurrence. In Canada, water quality guidelines are standardized nationally, but the management strategies for HABs are not. Here, we explore current strategies to understand how to better communicate risks associated with HABs to the public. Our team conducted an environmental scan on provincial and territorial government agency protocols around HABs. Results suggest that there are variations in the monitoring, managing, and communicating of risk to the public: British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, and Quebec have well-established inter-agency protocols, and most provinces report following federal guidelines for water quality. Notably, 3 northern territories have no HABs monitoring or management protocols in place. More populous provinces use a variety of information venues (websites, social media, on site postings, and radio) to communicate risks associated with HABs, whereas others’ communications are limited. To induce more collaboration on HABs monitoring and management and reduce the associated risks, creating a coherent system with consistent messaging and inter-agency communication is suggested.

Evolutionary Dynamics in Mediterranean Landscapes

The specific richness and value of Mediterranean landscapes require a robust, well-defined, and comprehensive conservation strategy planning. Therefore, and considering the relevance of the topic in the light of the sustainability concept, those planning strategies should be based and sustained by many different studies and fields in order to provide a full view of the issue. Contextually, the present study through the use of geographic information systems (GIS) tools and methods allows addressing the evolution of forest and semi-natural areas in the Iberian Peninsula in the last three decades. With this study it was possible to verify that the land uses related to forests and semi-natural areas suffered many changes – increasing and decreasing periods; in fact, some of the reducing is concerning and should have a closer look by the territorial government authorities to give protection and conservation to this unique Mediterranean landscapes and environments.

Ecosystem services decision support tools: exploring the implementation gap in Canada

This paper explores the degree to which the ecosystem services (ES) concept and related tools have been integrated and implemented within the Canadian government context at both the provincial/territorial and federal levels. The research goals of the study were to qualitatively assess the extent to which ES assessment is being integrated at different levels of government, consider the barriers to implementation, and draw lessons from the development and use of Canada’s Ecosystem Services Toolkit: Completing and Using Ecosystem Service Assessment for Decision-Making—An Interdisciplinary Toolkit for Managers and Analysts (2017), jointly developed by a federal, provincial, and territorial government task force. Primary data were collected through targeted semi-structured interviews with key informants combined with a content analysis of ES-related documentation from government websites. Results indicate that while the term ES is found in documentation across different levels of government, there appears to be an ES implementation gap. Issues of conceptual understanding, path dependency, a lack of regulatory mandate, lost staff expertise, and competition with overlapping conceptual approaches were identified as barriers to ES uptake. Areas requiring further policy and research attention are identified.

Performance of Concrete with Waste Plastics and M-Sand as Replacement for Fine Aggregate

In recent days, there is an intense need for an alternate cost effective and sustainable raw material for concrete which does not make the structure inferior in strength. An experimental study on the utilization of the waste plastic and M-sand in the place of river sand and aggregate partially was performed in paper. In the scenario of scarcity of river sand due to the territorial government action and restriction of usage because of the eco and environmental consideration, M-Sand is found to be an effective replacement and cost effective material. Concrete specimens were casted with combination of M-sand and plastic waste with 5%, 10%, 15%, 20% and 25% and compared against control mix. Cube test for compressive strength study, cylinder test for split tensile strength study and prism test for flexural strength study were done with the proposed concert mixture. All the specimens and tests were done for different curing period of 7, 14 and 28 days. The results obtained from the proposed mix of concrete are compared with the conventional concrete mix specimen respectively. The replacement of fine aggregates reduces the quantity of river sand to be used in concrete and also plastic fibres are proved to be more economical. Positive performance of the concrete with waste plastic and M-Sand as partial replacement of river sand was observed on all the experiments and found optimal in sustainable and economical performance.

A Tool for Better Land Management

The ability of keeping a record of geospatial information, knowing how it changed over time, is crucial for landscape analysis and territorial government. Land management is still a problem. Many governmental databases are incomplete, and there is a lack of reliable information. Good land management implies having a tool that can keep track of all the information available about a certain property and its changes over time. In this paper, we propose a land management tool where managers access all the information on a certain parcel of land—its boundaries, the land registration, a map which verifies the landcover, and the historic of updates of territorial limits. With the proposed tool, it is possible to edit the information of any property, whether it is active or not—that is, to also edit properties that no longer exist today, but that the user wants to add information to, for legal or other reasons. Keeping track of data properties’ revision history is groundbreaking due to the fact it is not well developed in existing tools. We will look at Brazil as a use case, where land management is a critical problem.