TA 2020., 2011.

 

I. Territorial cohesion is a common goal

For a more harmonious and balanced state of Europe. 

II. Challenges and potentials for territorial development

Driving forces and their territorial aspects.

III. Territorial Priorities for the Development of the European Union.

IV. Making EU territorial cohesion a reality 

The governance and implementation mechanisms.

The Atlantic., 2012.

 

The last decade has seen the Turkish economy grow at record and world-leading rates and show a remarkable immunity to the financial and economic ills that have gripped the economies of many other countries. But with the Eurozone crisis coming right up to its borders, can Turkey's economy -- which is heavily dependent on trade with Europe -- avoid being impacted by the economic troubles to its west? Not very likely says Daron Acemoglu, a well-known Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist, in an interview with the Hurriyet Daily News. 

The Guardian., 2012.

 

On a crisp autumn evening in a north London street, a rôtisserie trailer is parked outside a garden flat, green fairy lights blinking on and off, warm chickens perfuming the air. A thirtyish hipster wanders out to where I'm standing with a friend on the pavement and drawls his unimpressed judgment of what is going on inside. "I think the arancinis are not quite spicy enough," he informs us, with an eaten-it-all-before air. "Could have more flavour, not really exotic." Right now I haven't the faintest idea what "arancinis" are (or that arancini, like panini, is already an Italian plural), but I nod knowingly while typing his thoughts into my phone, and my friend keeps him talking. "I thought the Korean burger was quite good," the hipster goes on, without much kimchi-fired enthusiasm, "but I think a lot of people don't make their food with enough shbang … They kind of cater to the middle of the road." Twenty-five years ago, he could have been an indie-rock fan bemoaning the blandness of chart music. Now he's a social-smoking, foodier-than-thou critic at a "Food Rave".

TSPEU., 2011.

 

Sustainable economic growth. employment and social ecological development are key objectives of the european union. However, cinditions the EU are not the sameeverywhere. The regions and cities of Europe face different challenges, which play a crucial role in determining our live. Thus, climate change has an impact on the way in which we work and live; demografic change and migratio are changing social structures; and unbalance territorial structures are having an adverse effect on the sustainable development of the environment in which we live. 

United Nations ESCAP.

 

What is Green Growth? 

Green Growth is a policy focus for the Asia and Pacific region that emphasizes environmentally sustainable economic progress to foster low-carbon, socially inclusive development.

Where is Green Growth?

Green Growth is a globally relevant approach to sustainable economic growth that was developed in Asia. It is imperative that countries in the Asia and Pacific region continue their economic growth to alleviate poverty and to achieve social progress. However, increased environmental degradation, climate change and diminishing natural resources require an unconventional approach to support the export-driven economic activities of the region.

 

Why Green Growth?

The Asia and Pacific region has been at the forefront of the 21st century surge in economic growth, a situation driven primarily by exports and which has led to expanded production requirements needed to fuel an ever increasing amount of trade. This has significantly compounded the environmental carrying capacity pressures of many countries in the region. These countries are now shouldering an increasingly greater share of regional and global environmental production-related burdens. Coupled with evolving production patterns, these impacts are driving changes in consumption patterns in these countries and policies are needed to ensure that these developments will be environmentally sustainable. The past axiom of “grow first, clean up later”, can not apply in a region that has such a limited natural resource base and a rapidly growing population directly dependent on natural resources. In light of the recent fuel, food and financial crisis is now imperative for countries in the region to reassess their development paths.

Van der Lippe, Tanja, Laura de Dulk, Anneke van Doorne-Huiskes, Joop Schippers, Linda Lane, and Margareta Bäck-Wiklund., 2009.

 

QUALITY is an innovative quantitative and qualitative research project that has examined how, in anera of major change, European citizens and workers living in different national welfare state regimesand subject to different public and organisational trends and policies evaluate the quality of their lives. The project analyses international-comparative data on the social well-being of citizens and collectsnew data on social quality in European workplaces in the selected partner countries: UK, Finland,Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Hungary and Bulgaria.

Overall aims of this project

 

1. to give insight, from an internationally-comparative perspective, in the quality of life and work of European citizens, the way the quality of life and work are interrelated, and the impactpublic and organisational policies have on the well-being of European citizens;

2. to increase our knowledge how and under what conditions European workplaces could betransformed into healthy organisations, where work is organised in a socially as well aseconomically sustainable manner;

3. to explore future trends by consulting national high-level groups (policy-makers, politicians,researchers, managers) and by sketching/constructing scenarios with respect to trendsconcerning the quality of life and work of European citizens;

4. to analyse whether, to what extent and how gender matters in the relationship between well-being and public and organisational policies.

William Engdahl, F., Global Reserarch; 2013.

 

The discovery in late 2010 of the huge natural gas bonanza off Israel’s Mediterranean shores triggered other neighboring countries to look more closely at their own waters. The results revealed that the entire eastern Mediterranean is swimming in huge untapped oil and gas reserves. That discovery is having enormous political, geopolitical as well as economic consequences. It well may have potential military consequences too.

 

Preliminary exploration has confirmed similarly impressive reserves of gas and oil in the waters off Greece, Turkey, Cyprus and potentially, Syria.

World Bank., 2012.

 

Inclusive green growth is the pathway to sustainable development. Over the past 20 years economic growth has lifted more than 660 million people out of poverty and has raised the income levels of millions more, but growth has too often come at the expense of the environment. A variety of market, policy, and institutional failures mean that the earth’s natural capital tends to be used in ways that are economically inefficient and wasteful, without sufficient reckoning of the true social costs of resource depletion and without adequate reinvestment in other forms of wealth. These failures threaten the long-term sustainability of growth and progress made on social welfare. Moreover, despite the gains from growth, 1.3 billion people still do not have access to electricity, 2.6 billion still have no access to sanitation, and 900 million lack safe, clean drinking water. Growth has not been inclusive enough.

This report argues that sustained growth is necessary to achieve the urgent development needs of the world’s poor and that there is substantial scope for growing cleaner without growing slower. Green growth is necessary, efficient, and affordable. It is the only way to reconcile the rapid growth required to bring developing countries to the level of prosperity to which they aspire with the needs of the more than 1 billion people still living in poverty and the imperative of a better managed environment.

 

 

Today, megatrends have become a relevant strategic issue in many corporate headquarters. Siemens, to name a significant example, has stressed the importance of megatrends for its business on various occasions. Driven by its CEO, Klaus Kleinfeld, Siemens has started to re-align its business fields focussing on the megatrends demographic change and urbanisation. Only recently, Z_punkt cooperated with Siemens’ Corporate Strategy department in creating a corporate management report on the megatrends crucial for the company. 

Some megatrends, such as demographic change, health, or mobility, have found a place on many agendas. Experience also shows, however, that businesses differ in their evaluation of specific megatrends – their relative strategic significance being determined by a company’s focus on specific markets, products, and customers. With its new global maxim “The Consumer Decides”, Nike is recognising a megatrend which we describe as a new phase of individualization. 

General Electric, on the other hand, focuses on similar issues as its competitor Siemens, showcased by its new “Ecomagination” dvertising campaign. How can companies create value from megatrends? Valuable insights will only be gained if information on a megatrend is translated into a company’s very own context, and into future innovation fields, markets, and products. Not the trend as such is of interest, but its strategic implications. If you want to prepare yourself in time for the future markets emerging from megatrends, Z_punkt can offer a wide range of tried-and-tested, business-specific approaches: Whether it’s lectures or one-day inhouse workshops, identification of strategic innovation fields or new business fields.

 

Innovation is a key factor determining productivity growth. Understanding the sources and patterns of innovative activity in the economy is fundamental to develop better policies. The Innovation Union Scoreboard (IUS) benchmarks on a yearly basis the innovation performance of Member States, drawing on statistics from a variety of sources, including the Community Innovation Survey. It is increasingly used as a reference point by innovation policy makers across the EU.

 

The IUS benchmarks performance at the level of Member States, but innovation plays an increasing role in regional development, both in the Lisbon strategy and in Cohesion Policy. Regions are increasingly becoming important engines of economic development. Geographical proximity matters in business performance and in the creation of innovation. Recognising this, innovation policy is increasingly designed and implemented at regional level. However, despite some advances, there is an absence of regional data on innovation indicators which could help regional policy makers design and monitor innovation policies. The European Regional Innovation Scoreboard (RIS) addresses this gap and provides statistical facts on regions’ innovation performance. In 2002 and 2003 under the European Commission’s “European

Trend Chart on Innovation” two Regional Innovation Scoreboards have been published. Both reports focused on the regional innovation performance of the EU15 Member States using a more limited number of indicators as compared to the European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS). In 2006 a Regional Innovation Scoreboard was published providing an update of both earlier reports by using more recent data and also including the regions from the New Member States but with an even more limited set of data as regional CIS data were not available.

Hållbar Stad.” 2013.

 

What is a risky and dangerous? What is safe? Peter Kells, an expert in the Canadian lekutrustningsbranschen, believes that one must look at how the play equipment is used and not just on what the standard says. Children rarely use the playground equipment in the way that adults imagined. Therefore, one should manage risk in playgrounds this fact, he says, while one should assume that the child's desire to challenge themselves can not be done without risk.

Those who work with children's outdoor environments generally accepts the standards and rules and question them rarely. Rather, they want to be sure that they eliminate all possible risks and "do right" so they have back free if something happens. Too one-sided focus on avoiding any kind of risk, however, go out of children's play facilities, says Peter Kell.

Gössling, Stefan, Jean-Paul Ceron, Ghislan Dubois, and Michael C. Hall., 2009.

 

The contribution of aviation to climate change is, with a global share of just 2% of emissionsof CO2 (see chapter 2, this volume), often regarded as negligible. This perspective ignores,however, the current and expected growth in air traffic, as well as its socio-cultural drivers. Aviation is a rapidly growing sector, with annual passenger growth forecasts of 4.9% in thecoming 20 years (Airbus 2008). In a carbon constrained world with the ambition to reduceabsolute levels of greenhouse gas emissions and limited options to technically achieve these(see chapter 13, this volume), the growth in air traveller numbers thus indicates an emergingconflict (see also chapter 4, this volume). Moreover, it becomes increasingly clear thataviation is an activity in which comparably few people participate. With regard to internationalaviation, it can be assumed that only about 2-3% of the world’s population fly in between anytwo countries over one consecutive year (Peeters et al. 2006), indicating that participation inair travel is highly unequally distributed on a global scale. The vast majority of air travellerscurrently originate from industrialized countries, even though there are some recent trends,particularly in China and India, showing rapid growth in air travel (cf. UNWTO 2007). There isalso evidence that air travel is unevenly distributed within nations, particularly those withalready high levels of individual mobility. In industrialized countries there is evidence of aminority of highly mobile individuals, who account for a large share of the overall kilometrestravelled, especially by air. These travellers are “hypermobile” in terms of participation infrequent trips, often over great distances. The following chapter sets out to describehypermobile travellers and their mobility patterns from both statistical and sociologicalperspectives. It also presents a case study of the distribution of mobility in France, anddiscusses the importance of hypermobile lifestyles for emissions of greenhouse gases andclimate change more generally.

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Gössling, Stefan, Magnus Bredberg, Anna Randow, Elin Sandström, and Patrik Svensson., 2006.

 

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Flockhart T., book, 2010.

 

What is the content of Europeanization? Which causal relationships should be explained? Which theory should be used? In answering these questions, the article forwards a conceptualization of Europeanization based on Historical Sociology and Social Constructivism, which implies a departure from the practice in the current Europeanization literature to concentrate on the contemporary with a narrow focus (EU-ization) at the expense of the historical with a broad focus (Europeanization). It is suggested that the causal relationships to be explained are the transfer of European ideas across time and space using a ‘present-as-reality’ definition of the European idea set. In doing so, it becomes apparent that Europeanization cannot be accepted as either static or something that is solely connected to the EU, and that Europeanization has been characterized by diffusion patterns going both into and out of Europe and sociological processes involving subtle shifts in process, structure, agents and conceptions of ‘Other’ and ‘Significant We’.

FAO, 2011

 

Andreas Faludi, Delft University of Technology, 2012.

 

Since the mid-2000s, multi-level territorial governance has entered European spatial planning/territorial cohesion discourse. A reading of the more common concept of multi-level governance as referring to the interaction between layers of government, each responsible for a given territory within a hierarchy of nested units suggests that the specification 'territorial' is redundant, but the paper points out another, more fundamental problem. This is the contradiction between underscoring the positions of regional and local levels of government, as for instance in the Committee of the Region's 'White Paper on Multi-level Governance,' and the invocation of the concept of governance. The emphasis should be, either on giving each level of government its proper place in a hierarchical constitutional order, or on the fluidity of decision-making characteristic of governance, in which case governments are actors like others. Indeed, the apostles of multi-level governance, Lisbeth Hooghe and Gary Marks, now distinguish multi-level governance Type I and Type II. Focusing on the interaction between levels of government, Type I does not really qualify as 'governance' but is rather multi-level „government.‟ This as against Type II which sheds the assumption of a hierarchical territorial order, Type II is thus no longer 'multi-level' but refers to more diffuse forms of the exercise of governance. To substantiate such claims, and after talking first about its derivative invoked by planners, multi-level territorial governance, the paper discusses the origins of the concept of multi-level governance. Then it elaborates on Type I and Type II. In exploring the implications of both for European spatial planning/territorial cohesion policy, the paper then focuses on what is rarely discussed in the relevant literature. These are the different notions of territory underlying. The contradictions inherent in multi-level (territorial) governance can be resolved by changing one‟s appreciation of territory from something that is a fixed given to one of territory as a social construct and as such malleable. This suggests a „metageography‟ different from the conventional one.

EUROSTAT, 2009.

 

The EU has a long-standing commitment to promoting gender equality, and the goal of eliminating inequalities and promoting equality between women and men is set out in Article 3(2) of the EC Treaty. One of the most important areas in this regard is the equal treatment of men and women in the labour market, particularly with respect to wages and salaries. In July 2007, the European Commission adopted a communication on the issue, recalling the need to implement a series of measures in order to tackle the wage differences between women and men, including through the provision of better statistics and analysis of the factors influencing the wage differences.

 

In this framework and on request of the Indicators Group of the Employment Committee of the Council and in coordination with the Directorate-General Employment and Social Affairs of the European Commission, Eurostat collects the Structural Indicator "Gender pay gap (GPG) in unadjusted form" on an annual basis. The unadjusted GPG is the relative difference between the average gross hourly earnings of women and men within the economy.

 

As an unadjusted indicator, the GPG gives an overall picture of gender inequalities in terms of pay and measures a concept which is roader than the concept underlying the principle of equal pay for equal work. In addition, the overall GPG figure does not take into account differences in individual characteristics of employed men and women, nor can it give an indication of the incidence and level of discrimination or segregation in the labour market.

 

From the reference year 2006 onwards, this indicator is based on the Structure of Earnings Survey (SES), a rich employer-employee matched data set However, the SES.

EU Statistics,2013.

 

The unemployment rate represents unemployed persons as a percentage of the labour force based on International Labour Office (ILO) definition. The labour force is the total number of people employed and unemployed. Unemployed persons comprise persons aged 15 to 74 who:

- are without work during the reference week;

- are available to start work within the next two weeks;

- and have been actively seeking work in the past four weeks or had already found a job to start within the next three months.