The R package mice imputes incomplete multivariate data by chained equations. The software mice 1.0 appeared in the year 2000 as an S-PLUS library, and in 2001 as an R package. mice 1.0 introduced predictor selection, passive imputation and automatic pooling. This article documents mice, which extends the functionality of mice 1.0 in several ways. In mice, the analysis of imputed data is made completely general, whereas the range of models under which pooling works is substantially extended. mice adds new functionality for imputing multilevel data, automatic predictor selection, data handling, post-processing imputed values, specialized pooling routines, model selection tools, and diagnostic graphs. Imputation of categorical data is improved in order to bypass problems caused by perfect prediction. Special attention is paid to transformations, sum scores, indices and interactions using passive imputation, and to the proper setup of the predictor matrix. mice can be downloaded from the Comprehensive R Archive Network. This article provides a hands-on, stepwise approach to solve applied incomplete data problems.

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mice: Multivariate Imputation by Chained Equations in R

世界経済・社会統計 = World development indicators

An influential conventional wisdom holds that civil wars proliferated rapidly with the end of the Cold War and that the root cause of many or most of these has been ethnic and religious antagonisms. We show that the current prevalence of internal war is mainly the result of a steady accumulation of protracted conflicts since the 1950s and 1960s rather than a sudden change associated with a new, post-Cold War international system. We also find that after controlling for per capita income, more ethnically or religiously diverse countries have been no more likely to experience significant civil violence in this period. We argue for understanding civil war in this period in terms of insurgency or rural guerrilla warfare, a particular form of military practice that can be harnessed to diverse political agendas. The factors that explain which countries have been at risk for civil war are not their ethnic or religious characteristics but rather the conditions that favor insurgency. These include poverty—which marks financially and bureaucratically weak states and also favors rebel recruitment—political instability, rough terrain, and large populations.We wish to thank the many people who provided comments on earlier versions of this paper in a series of seminar presentations. The authors also gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation (Grants SES-9876477 and SES-9876530); support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences with funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation; valuable research assistance from Ebru Erdem, Nikolay Marinov, Quinn Mecham, David Patel, and TQ Shang; sharing of data by Paul Collier.

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Ethnicity, Insurgency, and Civil War

Norms have never been absent from the study of international politics, but the sweeping “ideational turn” in the 1980s and 1990s brought them back as a central theoretical concern in the field. Much theorizing about norms has focused on how they create social structure, standards of appropriateness, and stability in international politics. Recent empirical research on norms, in contrast, has examined their role in creating political change, but change processes have been less well-theorized. We induce from this research a variety of theoretical arguments and testable hypotheses about the role of norms in political change. We argue that norms evolve in a three-stage “life cycle” of emergence, “norm cascades,” and internalization, and that each stage is governed by different motives, mechanisms, and behavioral logics. We also highlight the rational and strategic nature of many social construction processes and argue that theoretical progress will only be made by placing attention on the connections between norms and rationality rather than by opposing the two.

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International Norm Dynamics and Political Change

Protecting the world’s freshwater resources requires diagnosing threats over a broad range of scales, from global to local. Here we present the first worldwide synthesis to jointly consider human and biodiversity perspectives on water security using a spatial framework that quantifies multiple stressors and accounts for downstream impacts. We find that nearly 80% of the world’s population is exposed to high levels of threat to water security. Massive investment in water technology enables rich nations to offset high stressor levels without remedying their underlying causes, whereas less wealthy nations remain vulnerable. A similar lack of precautionary investment jeopardizes biodiversity, with habitats associated with 65% of continental discharge classified as moderately to highly threatened. The cumulative threat framework offers a tool for prioritizing policy and management responses to this crisis, and underscores the necessity of limiting threats at their source instead of through costly remediation of symptoms in order to assure global water security for both humans and freshwater biodiversity.

/pdf/global-threats-to-human-water-security-and-river-2hfichkqti.pdf

Global threats to human water security and river biodiversity

Private sector firms, nongovernmental organizations, rich and poor governments, and international organizations have always joined forces in various combinations to target specific global public policy goals. Although such collaboration is not new (witness the Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s), sustainable development partnerships are more organized and ambitious than ever before and are now a prominent part of the sustainable development policy landscape. However, systematic information about partnerships remains somewhat scattered, hard to find, and sometimes inaccessible; thus, it is useful to summarize a few of the most helpful Web resources on this key topic. The United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) maintains the most comprehensive inventory of partnerships at http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/partnerships/ partnerships.htm. This inventory began at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development (http://www .johannesburgsummit.org/) and continues as the primary device to register partnerships that choose to relate their activities with the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (http:// www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/WSSD_POI_PD/ English/WSSD_PlanImpl.pdf). The inventory contains information on more than 300 partnerships and can be queried by keywords, geographic scope, and lead partner. For each partnership, the database provides basic information including a Web site, partnership goals, organizational structure, and (where available) financial information. There are very few business-led partnerships registered under CSD. Many such partnerships are affiliated with the World Business Council on Sustainable Development (http:// www.wbcsd.org/), which provides basic descriptive information on partnership activities. However, the information at this Web site is not organized analogously to the CSD online database, and there is no way to generate structured lists of partnerships by topic or geography. The World Economic Forum, most well-known for its high-profile annual meetings in Davos, Switzerland, also promotes business engagement in sustainable development partnerships. Information about its many initiatives can be found at http://www.weforum.org/ site/homepublic.nsf/Content/Initiatives+subhome. Another source of information about businesses pledging to support global policy goals is the Global Compact (http://www.unglobalcompact.org/). Participation in the Global Compact is organized around 10 core principles rather than specific initiatives, so the information on its Web site is somewhat general: Participants can be queried by name, type, region, country, and the date of joining the compact. In addition, details about more than 40 regional and local networks are available. Many donor governments maintain Web sites about the partnerships in which they participate. For example, U.S. partnerships are documented at http://www.sdp.gov/; British efforts are detailed at http://www.sustainable-development.gov .uk/international/partnerships/index.htm; and Canadian initiatives are described at http://www.canada2002earthsummit .gc.ca/sd_action/partnerships_showcased_e.cfm. For the most part, these donor government sites are skimpy on details, providing primarily snapshot summaries and links to external Web sites.

Sustainable Development Partnerships

UNCED: Mileposts Along the Road from Rio

This paper provides an overview of what the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) calls "indirect and direct drivers" of change in ecosystem services at a global level. The MA definition of a driver is any natural or human-induced factor that directly or indirectly causes a change in an ecosystem. A direct driver unequivocally influences ecosystem processes. An indirect driver operates more diffusely by altering one or more direct drivers. Global driving forces are categorized as demographic, economic, sociopolitical, cultural and religious, scientific and technological, and physical and biological. Drivers in all categories other than physical and biological are considered indirect. Important direct drivers include changes in climate, plant nutrient use, land conversion, and diseases and invasive species. This paper does not discuss natural drivers such as climate variability, extreme weather events, or volcanic eruptions.

Research, part of a Special Feature on Scenarios of global ecosystem services Anthropogenic Drivers of Ecosystem Change: an Overview

We consider new methods of component extraction and identification for the Environmental Sustainability Index (ESI) – an aggregation of environmental variables created as a measure of overall progress towards environmental sustainability. Principally, we propose and illustrate a parametric version of Independent Component Analysis via Copulas (CICA). The CICA procedure yields a more coherent picture of the determinants of environmental sustainability.

Marc A. Levy

Papers

Sustainable Development Partnerships

UNCED: Mileposts Along the Road from Rio

Research, part of a Special Feature on Scenarios of global ecosystem services Anthropogenic Drivers of Ecosystem Change: an Overview

Quantifying Sustainability: Methodology for and Determinants of an Environmental Sustainability Index

Reducing the risk of conflict recurrence: The relevance of natural resource management