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Publications

NIBIOs employees contribute to several hundred scientific articles and research reports every year. You can browse or search in our collection which contains references and links to these publications as well as other research and dissemination activities. The collection is continously updated with new and historical material.

2012

To document

Abstract

The strengthening of administrative powers is comprehensively documented within national governments. This article asks to what extent centre formation also happens within international bureaucracies. Based on a large body of data (N=121) within three international bureaucracies, this study adds two new observations: First, administrative centre formation is primarily observed inside the European Commission and only marginally within other international bureaucracies – such as the OECD and WTO Secretariats. Moreover, within the Commission, centre formation is primarily observed at the administrative centre (the General Secretariat) and only marginally within bureaucratic sub-units. Concomitantly, administrative centre formation, when observed, does not seem to profoundly penetrate and transform international bureaucracies writ large. Second, variation in centre formation both across and within international bureaucracies is associated with two often neglected variables in comparative government literature: (i) first, the accumulation of relevant organisational capacities at the executive centre, and second, the vertical and horizontal specialisation of international bureaucracies.

2011

Abstract

This ESEE 2011 conference paper examines attitudes to private and public goods and bads from agriculture in Norway with a particular focus on organic agriculture. The issue is based on a survey among 939 Norwegians. The results show that the respondents strongly value public attributes of agriculture like a vivid countryside and cultural landscapes. Almost 60 percent of the sample emphasise that the government should aim to increase the production and sale of organic food. Respondents’ behaviour as consumers were investigated by collecting and analysing data that indicate which conditions respondents find most important when they buy milk, eggs, carrots and ketchup. Important conditions were taste, fresh, produced in Norway and no use of pesticides or fertilizers. The most important reasons for buying organic food were avoidance of pesticides, health and environmental concerns.

Abstract

This study examined the difference in workload brought about by exchanging a 3.5mm steel rope with a 4.0 mm synthetic fiber rope when dragging a strawline up a 300 m corridor in setting up a new cable-yarding line. Physiological workload was monitored through heart rate measurement, while the physical forces acting on the subject (rope mass and friction) were quantified using a dynamometer attached to a belt. While there was a substantial difference in force between rope types at full extent (140 N vs. 40 N), the result was less significant when seen against the total work required in moving the subjects own body mass up the slope. The direction of the resultant force vector appears to play an important role in the way that strain is experienced. It was discovered that 300 m was the maximum hauling distance for a single person using this rigging method with a steel wire strawline, whereas for the synthetic rope, the same tensile force would only be reached at 1200 m. This alone has important implications for labor saving amongst small cable logging teams.