Environmental governance, often characterized as a tug-of-war between central ambitions and local reluctance, provides a valuable lens for examining the dynamics of China’s central–local relations and their impact on policy processes, enhancing our understanding of both the changes and continuities of the Xi Jinping era. By analysing the eco-transformation of waste management through the framework of political steering theory, this article presents a nuanced avoidance strategy used by local governments, which we term minimum compliance. This strategy allows local authorities to cope with and sidestep centrally mandated policies while avoiding the consequences of policy failure. This study enriches the discourse on China’s central–local relations by exploring why top-level design has not reduced policy implementation deviations. It also highlights how local governments in the Xi era evade policy responsibilities in their daily operations and hedge against political pressure.

We provide upper bounds for the Assouad spectrum $\dim_A^\theta(\mathrm{Gr}({\kern2pt}f))$ of the graph of a real-valued Hölder or Sobolev function f defined on an interval $I \subset \mathbb{R}$. We demonstrate via examples that all of our bounds are sharp. In the setting of Hölder graphs, we further provide a geometric algorithm which takes as input the graph of an $\alpha$-Hölder continuous function satisfying a matching lower oscillation condition with exponent $\alpha$ and returns the graph of a new $\alpha$-Hölder continuous function for which the Assouad $\theta$-spectrum realizes the stated upper bound for all $\theta\in (0,1)$. Examples of functions to which this algorithm applies include the continuous nowhere differentiable functions of Weierstrass and Takagi.

Since the 1970s progressively more translators, in several European languages, have abandoned the traditional translation of ὁ βουλϵύσας at Physics 194b30 as ‘the adviser’ for a different one: ‘the deliberator’. The latter translation has never been defended, and is, as this article will argue, indefensible—the active of βουλϵύω is never used in classical prose in this sense. Furthermore, this translation obscures what may be a philosophically significant feature of the passage: the fact that all of the other examples of efficient causes Aristotle gives here, in what is his canonical account of the four causes, are cases where what causes something to move is distinct from the thing it causes to move (the father causes the child’s gestation, the builder causes the lumber’s turning into a house). An Aristotelian deliberator, on the other hand, while arguably an efficient cause, is the cause of their very own action. At least one ancient commentator, Simplicius, thought that Aristotle had good reasons to restrict his examples to causes distinct from what they set in motion. Both the traditional translation and the variant of it for which I shall argue, ‘the one who made the proposal’, fit this model.

This Article explores the reach of Section 9 of South Africa’s democratic Constitution which entrenches the right to equality before the law and equal protection and benefit of the law in the light of the long legacy of apartheid geography. It argues that the equality clause has had its most profound impact in relation to areas of the law where discrimination is embedded in legal rules, perhaps most notably in the field of family law, and that it has had less impact in addressing patterns of material inequality that run along racial lines but that are not directly furthered by legislation or legal rules. It identifies some of the reasons why the equality clause is less effective at addressing patterns of racial inequality that arise from social and economic practices.

A widely made claim in academic scholarship is that the governance of solar geoengineering is characterised by gaps in international law and the absence of regulatory mechanisms. This article presents a more nuanced perspective on this claim. Instead of focusing on one comprehensive regime to govern solar geoengineering (whether its use or its non-use), we adopt a multi-dimensional impact approach to consideration of solar radiation modification (SRM) technologies and their governance. We outline the diverse array of adverse impacts that any SRM governance regime would need to contend with, and map how many of these impacts fall within the purview of existing international institutions and obligations. We conclude that any future SRM governance regime would need to build upon or at least not contravene these existing obligations. While our analysis thus modifies the claim of gaps in international law relating to SRM governance, it also suggests that the fragmented yet comprehensive coverage of diverse impacts does not mean that global coordination to govern deployment of SRM is already in place. Instead, the fragmented web of institutions and principles that exists provides room largely for restrictive SRM governance, in order to prevent adverse impacts within core areas of concern.