ANTICIPATORY POLICY AND MARINE RESOURCES
Anticipatory policy is premised on the need to respond to warnings about future threats and opportunities by positive political action. This paper discusses the notion of anticipatory policy by using three cases from ocean policy, deepwater ports, ocean thermal energy conversion, and deep seabed mining. Such policies tend to be extremely vulnerable to changes in the economic and political environments within which they operate. In order to understand how such policies succeed or fail requires that studies of policy implementation decades, not just several years. Although there has been a move in this direction in assessing social welfare policies, this approach has been far less evident in the natural resources area. Copyright 1986 by The Policy Studies Organization.
Mr. Reagan and the oceans
The Reagan administration has been unusually successful in shaping the direction of public policy through a dual strategy of shifts and reductions in the federal budget and the staffing of government with those loyal to Mr. Reagan and his conservative ideas. The consequences for the oceans have been a massive shift of support away from civilian to military ocean activities. In addition to this major reorientation of ocean policy, the Reagan approach has been characterized by continuing conflict between different branches and levels of government, a strong preference for symbols over substantive ocean decisions, and the absence of any long-term vision of the role the oceans might play in the nation's future.
Symptomatic Trans-sexualism
A 24-year-old male schizophrenic had a delusion that he was female and had lived his life as a woman for almost two years. Unlike the only other reported case, his ‘symptomatic transsexualism’ responded to the effective treatment of his schizophrenia.