Regional Formation and Development Studies

The movement of Vikings not for all regions of our continent was concussion of bases of public life. In Grobiņa and on Kaup Scandinavians didn’t manage to take decisive places in these settlements and their activity proceeded under strict control of local power structures. Westbaltic sacral phenomenon became the absence reason in Grobiņa and Kaup of settlements with the lines typical for the trade and craft settlement of an era of Vikings.

This paper examines what benefits business can achieve by implementing corporate social responsibility reports in its activities.There are also analyzed the evolution of CSR reporting, systemized theoretical aspects of CSR reporting in marketing field. Thearticle emphasized that then satisfying stakeholders’ expectations, needs, and informing them of the action taken to meet these expectations,the organization have greater success of the business, i.e. stability and profitability. Literary analysis showed that CSRreporting is becoming the main tool of linking different holistic marketing programs.

Importance of sustainable coastal governance also in the Baltic sea region has been widely recognised and since such governance has to have integrative nature that requires horizontal cross-sectorial integration as well as involvement of all governance levels and subsequently organisation of vertical integration among the levels. Besides some succesfull local cases around Europe, mainly special outside projects based, there is to be recognized that the municipal integrated sustainable coastal governance has not been yet neither well and widely locally developed in practice nor sufficiently researched field in order to permit necessary design of adequate policy innovations. Practical development and local realisation of the municipal integrated coastal governance often encounters obstacles of the basic nature, e.g. because there are not sufficiently understood and applied cross- and trans-disciplinary approaches – studies and governance of the coastal territories as the complex social-ecological systems (SES). For understanding the process and structure of coastal governance, application of system thinking and system dynamics methods are to be emphasized as well. The paper demonstrates adaptation of coastal nature studies based System Analysis Framework (SAF) methodology for its application to coastal governance studies and general municipal governance system adjusting and upgrading towards coastal issues, what could be seen as the new step for SAF further planned developments. As the part of the EU BONUS programme BaltCoast project, the authors performed, including main stakeholders participation elements, the issue identification step, system definition and also a conceptual model building steps of the SAF methodology application in the particular, local governance innovations rich, case study territory – Salacgriva municipality in Latvia. Coastal governance problems in Latvia are especially relevant for rural coastal municipalities with limited administrative capacities and long and low populated coastline territories. The next SAF application steps will include development of coastal governance system scenarios using a systems modelling tool and the design and testing of complementary set of governance instruments as science-policy interface, that shall support sustainable use of coastal resources in the interests of coastal nature and culture protection, and local socio-economic development.

Climate change adaptation being one of today’s main challenges on global agenda do affect people worldwide, but even though most decisions regarding climate change governance are made at the international or national level, the implementation of these decisions in most cases takes place at the local level. Municipal climate change adaptation research project in Latvia was carried out with special emphases on main stakeholder understanding, preparedness and communication factors using several complementary research methods – case study research in Salacgriva coastal municipality, sociological surveys with both Salacgriva town households / inhabitants (home visits / questionnaires) and also nation-wide municipal planners/ specialists survey (web based) in Latvia, as well as complementary interviews with various national agencies governance level experts. The comprehention and level of understanding of all sectors and necessary elements of complex municipal climate change governance development in Latvia is not sufficiently high neither for municipal planners/specialists nor for municipal (flood endangered) households, according to the needs of both those groups. There is in Latvia diverse and wide list of separately developed and already available instrument groups for municipal climate change governance (MCCG), especially, complementary communication instruments, as well as suffient enough number of insturments are in possession of the any particular municipality, but usage of them is quite limited by their type and range, and not complementary. Necessary is to change municipal project type thinking-working towards comprehensive planning / programming municipal development / support and pro-active communication and collaboration.

The article analyses the development of employee financial participation in Lithuania, describes the legal environment of financial participation, and supports this participation. Two methods were used to analyse employee financial participation: 1) the method of logical analysis in examining the internal documents of companies; 2) the qualitative research methods of focus group and semi-structured individual interviews. Theories of the agency and stakeholders were used to analyse the data collected. These theories are usually applied in research in an integrated way, analysing employee financial participation to elucidate the phenomenon of employee ownership, and examining the agent’s performance. It has been established that in Lithuania four employee share ownership programmes and plans usually apply: extensive employee share option programmes (granted to public limited companies whose shares are traded on stock exchanges); granting employee stock options to executives (so-called executive stock option programmes and one-time decisions); stock option programmes in start-ups; and shares granted by shareholders to employees.