Rapid growth in economic development, coupled with the absence of an electric grid in large areas of the rural countryside, has created a need for new energy sources both in urban centers and rural areas in China. The most critical need for rural electrification exists in northern and western China, where 80 million people had no access to grid electricity at the end of 1995. In February 1995, ...

The case study of Elvas – one of the main military border zones – is the subject of this essay, which studies the way in which municipal administrations reacted and adapted to the Portuguese Restoration War. It analyses the relationships between the local authorities, the army and the central government and the way in which Elvas Town Council dealt with the ever-growing defensive, logistic, eco...

Housing plays an important role in the development of welfare policies and also often in achieving sustainability goals. There exists, however, implementation gaps between policies and practices in urban development and housing. Here it should be possible to draw lessons from policy implementations in the past. In this article we explore the strategies of the Swedish central government in imple...

Almost from its birth the NHS has been haunted by a vision. In it, the service emerges from the tutelage of central government as an independent corporation emancipated from control by civil servants and no longer vulnerable to sudden ministerial whims or political pressures. It is an idea that has surfaced from time to time, as in the report of the 1979 Royal Commission'; it has also been cons...

In the UK, there are policy and regulatory concerns regarding the governance of care homes and healthcare provision within these homes. From a public health perspective, these issues can pose significant challenges to the provision of safe and quality medication use services to care home residents. The objective of this paper is to highlight an important and neglected issue for the growing popu...

The aim of this paper is to examine how the University of Huddersfield embraced the ethos of community cohesion and made moves into a problematic community. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Oldham in Greater Manchester the paper presents insights into how higher education is viewed in the area. The research reveals that higher education in a deprived community is successful but one ...

In 1986 the federal government expanded its program of company inspections for enforcement of motor carrier safety regulations. We find that many parts of these inspections are unrelated to the safety performance of firms. Never the less, reinspection of firms found to be unsatisfactory in a previous inspection does appear to bring about a substantial improvement in their safety performance. Ho...

This article focuses on how Canada’s French minority in Quebec developed a nationalist discourse and used its provincial state to strengthen its economic and political status within the federation. It presents the parameters that define contemporary Quebec nationalism and its evolution over the past four decades. The first part of the article deals with nationalism during the ‘Quiet Revolution’...