Federal and state legislation, such as the National Environmental Policy Act and the California Environmental Quality Act, require that responsible agency staff consider the cumulative impacts of proposed activities before permits are issued for certain kinds of public or private projects. The Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ 1997) defined a cumulative impact as “...the impact on the envir...

PROBLEM The Affordable Care Act (ACA) requires nonprofit hospitals to conduct community health needs assessments (CHNA) every 3 years. Best practices for CHNAs are still emerging and, along with growing economic pressures, contribute to uncertainty about the short- and long-term costs hospitals will face as a result of the ACA. PURPOSE This article describes a community-based partnership coor...

Science-based policies and regulations have resulted in tremendous gains in environmental quality and reduced the population’s exposure to harmful pollutants (Fig. 1). In the United States, the gains have been driven by major laws that were passed and amended by Republican and Democratic administrations alike (Table 1). For example, the 1970 Clean Air Act (CAA), signed by President Richard Nixo...

Community–academic partnerships have demonstrated potential for studying and improving community and environmental health, but only recently have their policy impacts been systematically studied. This case study highlights the evolution, research, and policy processes and outcomes of a community based participatory research (CBPR) partnership that has had multilevel impacts on health policy con...

Engagement of the radiological protection community in the development of ICRP publications is essential to ensure the best possible system of protection for people and the environment. Normally this means involving a group of experts in the drafting, discussing progress and getting feedback in various forums, seeking comments through a process of open public consultation, and several steps of ...

After several years of revision, the International Commission on Radiological Protection, ICRP, recently published the 2007 Recommendations of the Commission (ICRP, 2007). The revision was carried out in a highly participative manner, offering the possibility to comment on various draft versions and provide input in other manners, to international and national organisations as well as to indivi...

A model for observing public service delivery choice in the presence of economic expansion is presented. Regression techniques were used to estimate the share of county population served by volunteer fire protection from variables measuring community demands for and relative costs of fire protection services.

At present, the topic of critical information infrastructure protection (CIIP) is mainly discussed in the domain of engineers, consultants, and IT security experts. All these communities address important aspects of the problem complex, but hardly ever deal with socio-political ones. This paper addresses the need for a greater role of the social sciences in the field, due to a range of importan...

In this article we argue that the regulation of Intellectual Property (IP) protection should go beyond the traditional regulatory models and follow a more flexible regulatory framework. Considering the range of industrial needs and developments, the article develops a differentiated Community IP protection model that could stimulate growth and innovation, alter the behavior of patent users, and...

Social security and social protection concepts are gaining importance, especially in the Pacific Island countries (PICs). The state-led welfare and social protection system is limited in PICs, where there has been a heavy reliance on traditional, informal and non-state social protection systems which are provided through extended family, kinship, and community. The aim of the paper is to examin...