Definitions Matter: Dynamic Policy Framing of the Arts in Boston’s Sustainable Cultural Development

Cultural sustainability has become a fourth pillar in sustainable development studies. Different from the research approach to embedding culture into conventional sustainable discourse, this article argues that the sustainability and resilience issues within the arts and cultural sector should be paid more attention to. Putting the arts and cultural sector in urban settings, sustainable cultural development entails dynamic policy framing and changing policy justifications in response to an evolving socioeconomic and political environment. Taking the policy framing of the arts as an analytical lens, this paper aims to investigate this dynamic change and key driving factors through an in-depth case study of Boston’s urban cultural development. This article finds that different definitions of the arts are associated with different arts-based urban development strategies across four stages of cultural development in Boston spanning a period of over 75 years. The working definition moved from art to the arts, then to the creative arts industry, and eventually to cultural assets and creative capital. The policy framing of the arts keeps evolving and layering in pursuit of more legitimacy and resources regarding groups of stakeholders, field industry components, types of industrial structure, and multiple policy goals. This dynamic policy framing has been driven by arts advocacy groups, policy learning process, urban leadership change, and cultural institutional change, allowing Boston to draw on a growing and diversifying set of cultural resources in pursuit of sustainable cultural development.

Dynamic Evaluation of Policy Feasibility, Feedbacks and the Ambitions of COALitions

The Paris Agreement prioritised international bottom-up climate negotiations. Meanwhile, research has asserted the coal exit as a prerequisite for Paris-consistent pathways. The Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA), an opt-in initiative toward phasing-out coal-fired electricity by mid-century, embodies both paradigms but currently encompasses just 5% of global coal demand. To assess its long-term prospects against Paris-consistent pathways, we couple the energy-economy model REMIND to an empirical coalition accession model and demonstrate a novel scenario analysis technique, Dynamic Policy Evaluation (DPE). Capturing co-evolutionary feedbacks between policy uptake and global energy markets, we simulate nationally-and-temporally-fragmented PPCA accession and analyse its sensitivity to coalition growth, sectoral ambition, and Covid-19-related uncertainty. Surprisingly, we find that virtually-global PPCA participation achieves <3% of 1.5oC-consistent coal declines, as non-electric consumption remains unregulated. In contrast, our median-estimate scenario (82% accession) assuming economy-wide coverage achieves ~53% efficacy (virtually-global: ~85%), suggesting that the PPCA should prioritise policy ambition over coalition expansion.

Dynamic Evaluation Design

A principal owns a firm, hires an agent of uncertain productivity, and designs a dynamic policy for evaluating his performance. The agent observes ongoing evaluations and decides when to quit. When not quitting, the agent is paid a wage that is linear in his expected productivity; the principal claims the residual performance. After quitting, the players secure fixed outside options. I show that equilibrium is Pareto efficient. For a broad class of performance technologies, the equilibrium wage deterministically grows with tenure. My analysis suggests that endogenous performance evaluation plays an important role in shaping careers in organizations. (JEL D21, D82, D83, J24, J31, J41, M51)

On the formation of the state borders of Afghanistan in the late XVIII – XIX centuries

The subject of this research is the formation of state borders of Afghanistan throughout the period from the mid XVIII century to the late XIX century. A brief overview is given to this process during the existence of the Durrani Empire, while the main part of research is covers the events of the XIX century, since the reign of the Barakzai Dynasty. The article leans on the works of the experts in history of Afghanistan of the corresponding period, history foreign policy of Afghanistan and its individual aspects, as well as related documents. This topic has not previously become the subject of separate research, which defines the novelty of this publication. The main results are as follows: the author divides the history of formation of the borders of Afghanistan into two stages &ndash; since 1747 to the mid XIX century, characterizes by the dynamic policy of Afghan rulers aimed at the expansion of their territories, including through military conquests; the second half of the XIX century, which determines the new borders of Afghanistan primarily by the external political actors and their activity. It is worth noting that the period from the late XVIII century and the entire XIX century marks the formation of state border of Afghanistan that remain to this day.

Dynamic Evaluation of Policy Feasibility, Feedbacks and the Ambitions of COALitions

The Paris Agreement prioritised international bottom-up climate negotiations. Meanwhile, research has asserted the coal exit as a prerequisite for Paris-consistent pathways. The Powering Past Coal Alliance (PPCA), an opt-in initiative toward phasing-out coal-fired electricity by mid-century, embodies both paradigms but currently encompasses just 5% of global coal demand. To assess its long-term prospects against Paris-consistent pathways, we couple the energy-economy model REMIND to an empirical coalition accession model and demonstrate a novel scenario analysis technique, Dynamic Policy Evaluation (DPE). Capturing co-evolutionary feedbacks between policy uptake and global energy markets, we simulate nationally-and-temporally-fragmented PPCA accession and analyse its sensitivity to coalition growth, sectoral ambition, and Covid-19-related uncertainty. Surprisingly, we find that virtually-global PPCA participation achieves <3% of 1.5oC-consistent coal declines, as non-electric consumption remains unregulated. In contrast, our median-estimate scenario (82% accession) assuming economy-wide coverage achieves ~53% efficacy (virtually-global: ~85%), suggesting that the PPCA should prioritise policy ambition over coalition expansion.

Multiauthority Attribute-Based Encryption with Traceable and Dynamic Policy Updating

Ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) is an encryption mechanism that can provide fine-grained access control and adequate cloud storage security for Internet of Things (IoTs). In this field, the original CP-ABE scheme usually has only a single trusted authority, which will become a bottleneck in IoTs. In addition, different users may illegally share their private keys to obtain improper benefits. Besides, the data owners also require the flexibility to change their access policy. In this paper, we construct a multiauthority CP-ABE scheme on prime order groups over a large attribute universe. Our scheme can support white-box traceability along with policy updates to solve the abovementioned three problems and, thus, can fix the potential requirements of IoTs. More precisely, the proposed scheme supports multiple authority, white box traceability, large attribute domains, access policy updates, and high expressiveness. We prove that our designed scheme is static secure and traceable secure based on the state-of-the-art security models. Moreover, by theoretical comparison, our scheme has better performance than other schemes. Finally, extensive experimental comparisons show that our proposed algorithm can be better than the baseline algorithms.