The achievement of the internal market for energy is going ahead in the EU 15 since a model is emerging for “coupling the national markets for electricity”. For about 15 years the EU 15 was made up of national markets open to each other through rules of access to the grids while organized...

The provision of local public services is increasingly being contracted out to private companies. We observe that local governments regularly choose the same private operator for a range of different services, and develop a model of relational contracts that shows how this strategy may lead to...

This paper employs a framework of dynamic energy analysis to model the growth potential of alternative electricity supply infrastructures as constrained by innate physical energy balance and dynamic response limits. Coal- red generation meets the criteria of longevity (abundance of energy...

In many countries, the electricity systems are quitting the vertically integrated monopoly organization for an operation framed by competitive markets. In such a competitive regime one can ask what the optimal management of the nuclear generation set is. We place ourselves in a medium-term...

This paper describes the approach to investment in rail infrastructure in four different European countries (Great Britain, France, Germany, and the Netherlands) with a view to understanding whether and how these countries differ in their approach to the sustainability of investment in...

Starting from a review of models of positional and valence issues, the paper – by tapping into the original definition of valence issue – introduces a classification of issues based on their level of overall, dychotomic agreement. This allows the placement of both positional and valence...

The European Commission has recently launched the Smart Cities Initiative to demonstrate and disseminate how to foster a quick transition towards local sustainable energy systems. Within this initiative, the three main challenges faced by pioneering cities, are to reduce or modify the demand for...

On 26 May Hungary and Slovakia both amended their citizenship laws. Hungary removed a residence requirement for naturalisation, opening thereby the door to naturalisation of ethnic Hungarian minorities in neighbouring states, while Slovakia decided that any Slovak citizen voluntarily acquiring...

The relationship between the nationality laws of the European Union Member States and European citizenship has long been the subject of academic discussion. The objective of the present paper is to investigate particularly the impact of the dual nationality regimes – for our purposes to be...

In this paper, we explore the security dimension of development in fragile situations, and address how the EU can better focus on the security dimension of its policies to-wards countries facing fragility. We stress development sequences in which economic, political and security factors...