Learning is considered a means to achieve sustainability in practice and has become a prominent goal of sustainability interventions. In this paper we explore how learning for sustainability is shaped by meaning, interpretation and experience, in the context of UNESCO Biosphere Reserves (BRs). The World Network of Biosphere Reserves brings environmental conservation, socio-economic development and research together in 'learning sites for sustainable development.' The World Network is globally significant, with 669 BRs in 120 countries, but as with many paradigmatic sustainability interventions BRs are perceived to suffer from a 'concept-reality gap.'We explore this gap from an interpretive perspective, focusing on participant interpretations of the meaning of BRs and their experiences of working with the conceptwith the aim of painting a richer picture of learning for sustainability and the ways in which BRs might fulfil their role as learning sites. We provide a crosscase analysis of learning in 11 BRs around the world, drawing on interviews with 177 participants, and ask: How is the BR concept interpreted and enacted by people involved with BR work? What learning emerges through BR work, as described by those involved? We find that the BR concept is interpreted differently in each location, producing distinct expectations, practices and institutional designs. Learning occurs around common themeshuman-environment relationships, actors and governance arrangements, and skills to navigate BR workbut is expressed very differently in each BR. The position of BRs 'in between' social, ecological and economic goals; local places and global networks; and government, private and civil society sectors, provides a valuable space for participants to learn to live with socialecological complexity. We discuss our results in terms of their contribution to three pressing concerns in sustainability science: (i) power and politics in learning for sustainability, (ii) intermediaries and bridging organizations in multi-level governance, and (iii) reflexivity and knowledge-action relationships. Our comparative hermeneutic approach makes a novel methodological contribution to interpretive studies of sustainability policy and governance.

The aim of this paper is to investigate if stakeholder participation increases the legitimacy of nature reserves in the surrounding community. Most previous studies of the effects of stakeholder participation in natural resource management have relied on case studies, but in this paper we use a combination of panel data from a two-wave survey (2008 and 2013) of 92 Biosphere Reserves (BRs) in 36 countries and semi-structured interview data from 65 stakeholder respondents in a subsample of 10 BRs to systematically investigate the effects of stakeholder participation on the legitimacy of the natural reserve in the local community. The data cover four levels of stakeholder participation: (1) Information, (2) Implementation, (3) Involvement and (4) Representation. These levels roughly correspond to rungs on Arnstein's ladder of participation, and the expected outcome is that the legitimacy of the nature reserve will increase in the surrounding local community as the degree of participation increases. However, findings suggest that there is no linear relationship between participation and legitimacy: climbing upwards on Arnstein's ladder of participation does not uniformly enhance the level of legitimacy of the nature reserve in the local community. Instead, a practice-based form of participation is what seems to increase legitimacy.

Stakeholder participation in natural resource management has spread widely, even to nondemocracies, driven by expectations of beneficial outcomes such as multidirectional learning. However, can we expect participation to be equally effective in achieving multidirectional learning in democracies and nondemocracies? Unsurprisingly, previous studies indicate the relevance of power distribution for learning. Higher levels of repression and accumulation of political capital in nondemocracies should limit the distribution of power across stakeholders. Yet, the relationship between political regime, participation, and learning has rarely been studied empirically. I address this gap by analysing multidirectional learning in stakeholder participation in 81 Man and the Biosphere reserves across 35 countries using ordinary least squares regression, Firth logistic regression, and heat maps. The results suggest that the amount of stakeholders sharing knowledge and learning is similar in both regimes. However, a closer analysis reveals differences in the impact different stakeholders have on the learning process. More concretely, local actors share knowledge more often and have a greater impact on stakeholders' learning in democracies, while state actors display similar behavior across regimes in terms of learning and sharing knowledge. Thus, although there are notable similarities across regimes, multidirectional learning through stakeholder participation is influenced by the political context.

El patrón oro fue el sistema monetario preponderante entre finales de los setenta y la Primera Guerra Mundial. España nunca formó parte de él. El tipo de cambio de la peseta fue flexible. Las consecuencias de no adoptar el patrón oro todavía se discuten. Una parte de los estudios destaca el impacto negativo a largo plazo que esto pudo tener para el crecimiento económico español. Otros señalan que el coste de formar parte de dicho sistema monetario era inasumible para un país periférico como España. El debate sigue abierto.

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The gold standard was a monetary system based on fixed exchange rates, whereby domestic prices were pegged to the international price level and a high level of control had to be exercised over the money supply. This meant that fiscal discipline also had to be maintained for a country to remain on the gold standard. In times of crisis, countries had to leave the gold standard or use internal devaluation. This article seeks to gain an understanding of the role of the different economic policies in Italy and Spain at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century and how they were used in response to reductions in GDP. This article considers fiscal policy, monetary policy, and exchange rate policy estimating a VAR model. Results show how the exchange rate depreciation had positive effects on the Spanish economy during 1870–1913, while it only helped the Italian economy in specific periods to overcome crises. The expansive monetary policy was necessary for both countries to maintain public expenditure, which in turn allowed a smoothing of the GDP fluctuations. None of these policy options would have been available under the gold standard.

La exportación de jerez fue uno de los principales renglones de la balanza comercial española durante gran parte del siglo XIX. La mayor parte de las ventas se destinaron al Reino Unido, un mercado donde la distribución estaba férreamente controlada por comerciantes autóctonos. Este trabajo analiza los cambios en el número de exportadores y en el grado de concentración del volumen exportado en uno de los momento de mayor esplendor. Ello es posible gracias a una fuente singular, las listas de extractores, que desglosan las cantidades vendidas por cada uno de ellos. Los estadísticos utilizados para medir la concentración muestran la existencia de dos periodos, cuyos cambios se explican por tratarse de un mercado donde concurrían oferentes muy heterogéneos, tanto por su estructura de costes como por sus estrategias de comercialización.