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Where policy goals can be achieved through regulation of private firms, private provision of public services allows governments to separate public policies from their political costs by shifting those costs to the private sector. Over the past three decades, financial decoupling has emerged as a regulatory strategy for promoting conservation, especially in the energy sector. Decoupling refers to the separation of a firm's revenues from the volume of its product consumed, which allows companies to pursue resource efficiency free from financial risk. Similarly, when private firms provide public services, they separate public policies from their political costs. This political decoupling allows governments to pursue controversial policies while avoiding their attendant political risks. Applied to environmental policy, this theory implies that potentially unpopular conservation policies are more likely to be adopted and succeed when implemented through private firms. As an initial test of the theory, we analyze California water utilities and their responses to that state's drought from 2015–2017. Analysis shows that, compared with those served by local government utilities, private utilities adopted more aggressive conservation measures, were more likely to meet state conservation standards, and conserved more water. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: A decoupled visual model and a fractional PID controller are designed aiming at the problem of the view distortion in the fillet weld welding process. Firstly, the intersection point coordinates of two laser stripes are selected as the image characteristics, and the decoupled visual model is designed to the tracking control of the fillet weld seam so that the control value in two directions is decoupled, reducing the difficulty of control. In addition to this, the image may produce distortion in the dynamic tracking process, causing nonlinearity and coupling in two directions. To solve this problem, the fractional‐order PID controller is designed so that the adjustment range and the control ability are improved better than the traditional PID controller. Some experiments verify that the desired performance can be achieved by using the proposed methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Key points Technological and policy developments are changing the context for long‐form scholarly writing. In the face of a changing context, the structures supporting the publication of academic books have been stable. There may be potential benefits in separating the functions of the journal in a decoupled model. Separating functions could also be applied to long‐form scholarly works, with potential benefits that are worth exploring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Microaerophilic, phototrophic and nitrate‐reducing Fe(II)‐oxidizers co‐exist in coastal marine and littoral freshwater sediments. However, the in situ abundance, distribution and diversity of metabolically active Fe(II)‐oxidizers remained largely unexplored. Here, we characterized the microbial community composition at the oxic‐anoxic interface of littoral freshwater (Lake Constance, Germany) and coastal marine sediments (Kalø Vig and Norsminde Fjord, Denmark) using DNA‐/RNA‐based next‐generation 16S rRNA (gene) amplicon sequencing. All three physiological groups of neutrophilic Fe(II)‐oxidizing bacteria were found to be active in marine and freshwater sediments, revealing up to 0.2% anoxygenic photoferrotrophs (e.g., Rhodopseudomonas, Rhodobacter, Chlorobium), 0.1% microaerophilic Fe(II)‐oxidizers (e.g., Mariprofundus, Hyphomonas, Gallionella) and 0.3% nitrate‐reducing Fe(II)‐oxidizers (e.g., Thiobacillus, Pseudomonas, Denitromonas, Hoeflea). Active Fe(III)‐reducing bacteria (e.g., Shewanella, Geobacter) were most abundant (up to 2.8%) in marine sediments and co‐occurred with cable bacteria (up to 4.5%). Geochemical profiles of Fe(III), Fe(II), O2, light, nitrate and total organic carbon revealed a redox stratification of the sediments and explained 75%–85% of the vertical distribution of microbial taxa, while active Fe‐cycling bacteria were found to be decoupled from geochemical gradients. We suggest that metabolic flexibility, microniches in the sediments, or interrelationships with cable bacteria might explain the distribution patterns of active Fe‐cycling bacteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have policies that are unquestioningly accepted as appropriate remained symbolic? To answer the research question, I suggest two possible reasons for decoupling between policy and practice: the characteristics of normative pressure as 'the weak enforcement mechanism of law' through the implementation stage and jurisdictions' capacity to infuse the stories of success based on others' use to their own day-to-day realities. In this article, I seek to reintroduce a seminal contribution of the early institutionalists by challenging the assumption that dimensions of adoption and implementation are synonymous or positively correlated. Empirical findings contribute to provide scholars and practitioners with a larger picture of policy diffusion and support the arguments by Nicholson-Crotty and Carley that policy learning takes place based on policymakers' assessment of both 'policy actions' and 'outcomes' in previously adopting jurisdictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the vast literature on policy implementation, systematic cross-national research focusing on implementers' performance regarding different policy issues is still in its infancy. The European Union policies are conducive to examining this relationship in a comparative setting, as the EU member states need to implement various EU directives both legally and in practice. In this study, a first attempt is made to analyse the relationship between legal conformity and practical implementation and the conditions for practical deviations in 27 member states across issues from four policy areas (Internal Market, Environment, Justice and Home Affairs and Social Policy). In line with existing approaches to EU compliance, it is expected that the policy preferences of domestic political elites ('enforcement') affect their incentives to 'decouple' practical from legal compliance. Instead, administrative and institutional capacities ('management') and societal constraints ('legitimacy') are likely to limit the ability of policy makers to exert control over the implementation process. The findings suggest that practical deviations arise from policy makers' inability to steer the implementation process, regardless of their predispositions towards internationally agreed policies. The results have strong implications for the effective application of international rules in domestic settings, as they illustrate that political support for the implementation of 'external' policy does not ensure effective implementation in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of globalization has been a perennial source of contention, and issues regarding labor rights have been a visible aspect of this struggle. Despite the popular controversy about a potential 'race to the bottom' regarding globalization and labor rights, the empirical record on these linkages remains mixed. Moreover, despite the multifaceted nature of globalization, extant literature in this area has focused purely on several specific facets of economic globalization, such as trade and FDI. We focus on two additional aspects of globalization, social and political integration, as well as a broadly based measure of economic globalization, and examine how they influence collective labor rights-both in terms of labor laws, as well as their enforcement in practice-in the developing world from 1986 to 2002. We find that all three facets of globalization are negatively related to labor rights. Specifically, social, political, and economic globalization are related to the decoupling of labor practices from extant labor laws; that is, labor practices deteriorate while labor laws remain largely unaffected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fragmentation of a donor's foreign aid across too many recipient countries is widely believed to be detrimental to aid effectiveness. This article explores the origins of a new norm - recipient concentration - and assesses the extent to which it can be expected to improve aid effectiveness. It also examines 23 donors' actual record of country concentration, and finds that, though there are some potential explanations for donors' behaviour, their collective failure to implement country concentration has very little consequence in theory or in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses her experiences of ethnographic fieldwork in hospital intensive care units which bused interprofessional morning rounds by physicians, nurses and pharmacists which were seen as unsatisfactory in providing best medical care. Using the neo-institutional theory concept of decoupling, the article considers how to disengage from unproductive processes. Topics include problem-based learning, desired outcomes, institutional aims and policy goals, and the intent of policies compared to their implementation.