Authoritative Account Research Articles

Impact and significance of the 2016 ‘Campaign to Change the Male Face of Parliament’ in Iran

Iranian women have never represented more than 5.9% of sitting parliamentarians in the Islamic Republic of Iran. This compares poorly with relevant regional and global averages. In the lead up to the 2016 parliamentary elections, the women’s movement took action to address the low representation of women in the legislature by launching the ‘Campaign to Change the Male Face of Parliament’. The Campaign did not reach its goal of achieving 50 seats for women in the 2016–2020 Parliament. It was also subject to some criticism for effectively (or apparently) legitimising what many women view as a broken form of government unable to promote and protect women’s rights in any meaningful sense. However, the Campaign was an important exercise in democracy and had significant higher-order impacts on voter behaviour and women’s capacities. Through personal communication with three Campaign activists, this profile provides an authoritative account of the Campaign experience and its impact and significance for the future of women’s empowerment in Iran.

Accountability and Co-Production Beyond Courts: The Role of the European Ombudsman

The complexity of the institutional arrangements for EU administrative decision-making bears repeating: decision-making processes are fragmented, sometimes obscure, and highly varied; lines between institutionally separated areas of responsibility (most obviously ‘science’ and ‘politics’) are difficult to maintain; the multiple levels of governance involved in decisions are often impossible to disentangle, so that processes can no longer (if they ever could) be easily categorised as intergovernmental or supranational; and public and private actors work together in ways that make it difficult to define a body as either ‘public’ or ‘private’. Within this elaborate system, authority is almost self-consciously co-produced in the ways that different actors support their own authority by reference to other actors in the process, and use their own authority to support those other actors. The complexity and co-production of authority exacerbates the already daunting challenges of holding the exercise of power to account, as the classical routes of legal and political accountability fall short. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the European Ombudsman is able to augment the accountability of authority in the EU. It will particularly explore the Ombudsman’s interventions in cases where ‘expertise’ is a dominant legitimating mechanism for a ‘political’ process of risk management. But it will attempt also to examine the other aspect of this equation, the ways in which the political process shapes the legitimacy of EU regulatory science, as well as the difficulty of drawing clear lines between those categories. The proactive and structural role of the Ombudsman provides a space in which there is at least potential to address the diversity of fora and processes in which expertise has a central role in EU administration, and the distinctiveness of co-production.

A Memory of Quark Matter '83: how it was that the same paper, written by a nuclear theorist and a particle experimentalist, was presented twice at the same Quark Matter Conference

This memoir gives an author's account of the unusual event at the Quark Matter '83 as indicated in the title. (Editors)

An Essentialist Account of Authenticity

The concept of authenticity is central to how people value many different types of objects and yet there is considerable disagreement about how individuals evaluate authenticity or how the concept itself should be defined. This paper attempts to reconcile previous approaches by proposing a novel view of authenticity. Specifically, I draw upon past research on psychological essentialism and propose that when people evaluate the authenticity of objects, they do so by evaluating the extent to which the object embodies or reflects a valued essence. I suggest that this explanation of authenticity provides an overarching framework that describes how people evaluate object authenticity across a variety of contexts and I report the results of three experiments that directly test the predictions made by this explanation.

The Shoulders of Giants: A Case for Non-veritism about Expert Authority

Among social epistemologists, having a certain proportion of reliably formed beliefs in a subject matter is widely regarded as a necessary condition for cognitive expertise. This condition is motivated by the idea that expert testimony puts subjects in a better position than non-expert testimony to obtain knowledge about a subject matter. I offer three arguments showing that veritism is an inadequate account of expert authority because the reliable access condition renders expertise incapable of performing its social role. I then develop an alternative explanation of expert authority that I call the epistemic facility account, arguing that having a certain type of competence in a subject matter or domain of subject matters is sufficient for explaining expert authority while avoiding the problems with veritistic accounts.

Who's afraid of EBM? Medical professionalism from the perspective of evidence-based medicine.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) and medical professionalism are two prominent notions in current medical debates. However, proponents of professionalism fear a restriction in doctors' freedom to make their best decisions for individual patients caused by the influence of EBM and highly standardised decision procedures. The challenge which EBM allegedly poses to physicians' discretion forms the starting point for an analysis of the relationship between professionalism, as an inherent value system of medical practice, and EBM, as an approach to optimise the decision-making for individual patients. The analysis starts with a brief conceptual clarification of the ambiguous term "professionalism". It then focuses on three key aspects of medical professionalism which may come into conflict with the basic tenets of EBM. The potential tensions between (a) professional autonomy and clinical practice guidelines, (b) individualised care and standardisation, and (c) esoteric authority and public accountability are analysed and a suggestion for reconcilement regarding each point is made. The article closes with a summary on how a better reflection on medical professionalism may help towards a fuller understanding of EBM and vice versa.

Authority and Reality in the Work of Oliver O’Donovan

Running throughout the work of Oliver O’Donovan is a discussion of the nature of authority, and its relation to reality, and to freedom. While holding fast to the maxim that authority is the correlate of freedom, O’Donovan’s understanding of authority moves, as a result of his engagement with the nature of political authority, to emphasise the idea of social mediation. This leads, in the most recent works, to a description of authority as an event in which reality is disclosed. Arguably, this formal account does not adequately distinguish the element of practical direction within authority, meaning that it may struggle to explain some ways in which we speak about authority’s presence, and its misuse. However, there may be resources for making this distinction within O’Donovan’s understanding of judgment as an act of moral discrimination with a twofold form. O’Donovan’s is an elegant and economical account of authority, promising to provide a simple analysis that encompasses the peculiarities of authority and illuminates a wide range of phenomena.

Preventive Anti-Corruption Measures in Public Procurement: Issues and Challenges

The lack of integrity and corruption affects human rights, has important implications on the market and represents an issue in Public Procurement. Non-transparent economic interests supported by lobbies may influence legislation, its implementation, the competition and finally the economic growth and competiveness of the market itself.One increasingly popular way for States to prevent bribery committed overseas is adopting measures with extraterritorial implications or to assert direct extraterritorial jurisdiction in specific instances. These measures may have local preferences implications.A community of values is growing in the wider context of transnational and international bodies such as OECD, UN, and single Member States, to promote a joint system against corruption, but still needs clear means of actions.How to ensure integrity, accountability and transparency of public authorities and economic operators across Countries?The paper investigates two different profiles linked to the same phenomena with a comparative approach. The legal boundaries of lobbying as joint to conflicts of interest and corruption, on one side; the effects of some extraterritorial legislation, such as the US and the UK anti-bribery models, on the other. It analyses the role of private and public preventive anti-corruption measures as a mean of action.

Periphery: Israel's search for Middle East allies. By Yossi Alpher

Periphery: Israel's search for Middle East allies. By Yossi Alpher. London: Rowman and Littlefield. 2015. 159pp. Index. £21.95. ISBN 978 1 44223 101 6. Available as e-book. In this work, Yossi Alpher examines Israel's ‘policy of the periphery’, namely the country's relations with Iran, Turkey and Ethiopia, the Jewish state's search for alliances with ethnic minorities in Arab and Muslim countries and with those Arab states on the periphery of the Middle East with which it has shared concerns. The chapters deal not only with this intriguing aspect of Israeli foreign policy, but also detail the ramifications it had, and continues to have, in the Middle East and beyond. The chapters combine seamlessly, but may also be read as stand-alone vignettes. Alpher's book, far from being a pedestrian overview of Israeli statecraft, benefits from his unique experience and expertise as a former officer in Israeli military intelligence, and, later, as a Mossad operative. Readers are therefore treated to a personalized narrative of diplomatic events—for example the author's reticence in playing table tennis with Somali president Mohamed Siad Barre. Moreover, the author's account of Israeli involvement in southern Sudan in the early 1970s reveals just how the Jewish state's Africa policy, described by Golda Meir as ‘a continuation of our own most valued traditions and an expression of our own deepest historic ties’, bore such significant fruit for a state of diminutive stature—at least geographically.

Listhaug, Ola and Ramet, Sabrina P. (eds) Bosnia-Herzegovina Since Dayton: Civic and Uncivic Values (review)

SEER, 94, 2, APRIL 2016 384 some way in compensating for the well-known deficits plaguing the region’s fragile democracies. While Dawson’s pessimistic message is well taken, there is a silver lining. Center for European Studies Dimitar Bechev University of Harvard Listhaug, Ola and Ramet, Sabrina P. (eds). Bosnia-Herzegovina Since Dayton: Civic and Uncivic Values. Longo Editore, Ravenna, 2013. 430 pp. Notes. Tables. Bibliography. €35.00 (paperback). It is rarely easy to review an edited volume fully and fairly in the space of a short review. It is far harder to do so when it has a preface and nineteen chapters across 430 pages — which are also often densely written (and, in the odd case, might have benefited from a further round of copy editing). In addition to the Introduction (by the editors jointly) and the very useful Conclusion (by Listhaug), there are chapters on Bosnia’s convoluted political system and its context by Joseph Marko, Boris Divjak & Mike Pugh (theirs has also appeared as a journal article elsewhere), Fikret Čaušević and Marko Valenta & Zan Strabac; on values in the country and its communities by Kristen Ringdal, Ola Listhaug & Albert Simkus, one by Simkus on his own, and one by Siniša Zrinščak; on education, literature and media by Pilvi Torsti, Val Perry, Andrew Wachtel and Sanin Hasibović; on national groups by Harun Karčić, Florian Bieber and Sarah Correira; and, finally, tackling the challenges facing Bosnia and Hercegovina by Mitja Velikonja and by Zach Irwin. Simply listing all the authors and areas covered takes up most of the word-count allowed — as, of course, does my commenting in this way. I make the comment to excuse focusing in the short space available on four chapters, although they provide a deeply sobering understanding of Bosnia and its prospects. These chapters alone give the book value. The first of these is Sabrina Ramet’s excellent history — introduction, as she calls it — of Bosnia since Dayton. Anyone seeking an authoritative account of dates since the peace accords were signed in Dayton in November 1995 could not do better. It must be the starting point for anyone seeking to study Bosnian politics from Dayton until the time of writing. The only defect with it is that it has to end at the time of writing, and so the reader will already be looking for the updated account to cover the intervening period. The second is Perry’s chapter on education and reform. While noting that reform of the education sector has not been entirely absent and that only relatively limited means have been available for reform, she can only report REVIEWS 385 on the dismal predicament of a country in which ‘segregation and separation are endemic, manifest in subtle and not so subtle forms’ (p. 228). The ‘not so subtle forms’ include the apparent absurdity of a ‘two schools under one roof’ system in the Croat and Muslim dominated part of the country — the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (as opposed to the country, Bosnia and Hercegovina). This regime sees ethnic Croat and ethnic Muslim children following separate curricula. Of course, there is a completely separate curriculum again in the Serbian-dominated Republika Srpska — the other of the two entities comprising the Bosnian polity. Perry analyses schooling in three domains — religion, language and history — noting that the ‘issue of language is made even more difficult by the total mutual comprehensibility of the variants’ (p. 236), that a policy of allowing only one approved textbook in history in each curriculum means that ‘teachers have no choice’ and that, far from the perspective of liberal societies where the study of history fosters critical evaluation, both pupils and teachers might miss out on ‘the best of the new and modern books’ (p. 235). The gloomy education scenario depicted by Perry dovetails with the sombre research findings and conclusions evident in the other two chapters in focus here — the joint Ringdal, Listhaug and Simkus article on ‘Bosnian Values in a European Context’ and Simkus’s solo piece on divisions within Bosnia and core values. In the joint, comparative article, the authors conclude that ‘Bosnia shows an exceptional decline in social trust from 1998–2007’, and...

What is democratic reliability? Epistemic theories of democracy and the problem of reasonable disagreement

It has proven difficult to reconcile epistemic justifications of political authority, especially epistemic theories of democracy, with a basic liberal commitment to respecting reasonable value pluralism. The latter seems to imply that there can be no universally acceptable substantive outcome standard to evaluate the epistemic reliability of different political procedures. This paper shows that this objection rests on an implausible interpretation of political competence. In particular, the paper defends two claims: first, that epistemic theories of political authority are in fact compatible with a liberal commitment to respecting reasonable pluralism; but second, that if we take reasonable pluralism seriously, the standard of competence we should use is a pragmatic one. Good political decision procedures reliably fix practical problems of social coordination and adapt to new demands and developments; we need not demand that their decisions are all-things-considered just or optimal. This pragmatic account of political competence is compatible with reasonable pluralism, since on this basis we can comparatively evaluate political procedures without controversially asserting a single standard of ‘truth’ in politics. Hence, it is possible to give an epistemic account of political authority that works within a liberal theory of political justification.

Alexander Scott: Constructing a Legitimate Geography of the Sahara from a Captivity Narrative, 1821

Abstract:Alexander Scott’s narrative of his captivity in the Sahara in the early nineteenth century presents a curious example of how information of foreign lands was received and legitimized in Britain. Through the input of individuals such as Joseph Banks and James Rennell, Scott’s tale was presented as an authoritative account of the inaccessible West African interior. This article pursues this process of authentication and demonstrates how elements of the editors” preconceived notion of the region colored the subsequent text and associated cartography.

Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable

Paul G. Falkowski. 2015. Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, U.S.A., ISBN 978–0–691–15537, 205 pp., $24.95. Microbes rule the land and sea, always have and always will. They were the first life forms on Earth, dating back nearly 4 billion years, and their presence changed the chemistry of the planet and allowed for the evolution of higher life forms, including humans. As Louis Pasteur stated more than a century ago, “The very great is achieved by the very small.” Ironically, microorganisms were among the last life forms to be discovered and many of their vital secrets have not yet been revealed to the scientific world. What is known about the hidden world of the microbes and their fundamental roles in sustaining planetary habitability is insightfully revealed by Paul Falkowski in this authoritative, comprehensive, and delightful book. The author is uniquely qualified, perhaps singularly so, to cover topics ranging over broad time and space scales with a scholarly, transdisciplinary perspective that ranges from fundamental physics and chemistry, to Earth and ocean sciences, to ecology and evolution. I cannot think of any other scientist who would accept such a challenge. Falkowski's new book is very engaging and leaves the reader not only with an important scientific framework of Earth's history but also with important questions that reach even beyond our current understanding into an unknown world that is ripe for further exploration and discovery. The writing style is unique and, for those fortunate enough to know the author, “classic Falko.” He is a gifted scientist and writer, and legendary storyteller. Falkowski's epic scientific journey through time begins in a New York City housing project at the edge of Harlem. While still in his first decade of life, and with the curiosity of a child, Paul started to grow guppies and algae in his newly acquired aquarium. A few years later, his father bought him a microscope and, for the first time, he was able to explore the invisible world of microorganisms living within his aquarium. He supplemented his observations by reading books that he borrowed from the local public library. In his early teens, Paul discovered and explored a second invisible world—electromagnetic radiation. So began his lifelong quest to understand the “global electronic circuit of life” and the waypoints of Earth's history that led to the establishment of a habitable planet. Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable is a very personal story of Professor Falkowski's own journey through science, interwoven by historical accounts of relevant people and their discoveries in science, humanities, and the arts. The journey includes 11 chapters that step the reader through the origin of our solar system (Chapter 3, The World Before Time), the origin of microbes (Chapter 4, Life's Little Engines), and the eventual emergence of multicellular life forms (Chapter 8, Supersizing in Wonderland). Without a doubt, my personal favorites were Chapter 1 (The Missing Microbes), and Chapter 10 (The Tinkerers). It must have been difficult to cover more than 10 billion years in just 205 pages, but I must admit that Falkowski did a remarkable job highlighting the most significant waypoints in the origin and evolution of planetary metabolism, with appropriate homage to the microbial inhabitants of our planet. Unlike Aquatic Photosynthesis (Falkowski and Raven, second edition, 2013), Life's Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable is not a textbook, an encyclopedic treatise, or a novel, although it has elements of all three. Rather, it is an informative, authoritative, and personal account of “what matters” for planetary sustainability and, therefore, is recommended to all global citizens, taxpayers, and policy makers, regardless of their specific role in society. It is a “must read” for practitioners in the geosciences, especially undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in life on Earth. Finally, I should add that this book is part of Princeton University Press' Science Essential Series that collectively provide a foundation for a better understanding of the scientific and technical advances changing our world. After reading Falkowski's Life Engines: How Microbes Made Earth Habitable, you might wish to check out a few others in the series. I surely will. Reviewed by David M. Karl, Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education (C–MORE), University of Hawaii, C–MORE Hale, 1950 East West Road, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA; dkarl@hawaii.edu

Bertrand de Jouvenel on Power, Authority, and Trust

The paper will examine Bertrand de Jouvenel’s account of political authority and its relation with the question of trust. Jouvenel’s work offers a provocative and unique account of political authority, viewing it first and foremost as a type of instituting regular and reliable social relations between different members of a social community. As part of his thesis, Jouvenel distinguishes between two major types of political authority, which are referred to in the course of his writings as “power” and “authority.” While power, generally speaking, proceeds through the containment of individual agency in given fields, primarily through an appeal to personal interests or direct coercion, authority is manifested primarily in a charismatic or informal type of leadership influencing the agent’s behavior at a more implicit level. The distinction between power and authority, as Jouvenel emphasizes, implies a double conception of trust as an ethical and epistemic principle. While power provides the necessary regularity by means of mediated information which is normally embedded in certain bureaucratic organization, authority provides a more immediate type of regularity by instituting “hubs” of social regularity, especially through the quality of personal character. The relation between the two types of political authority can be seen as involving a type of equilibrium. While power deals with reducing the externalities and risk that are encompassed in human interaction and allows for basic subsistence, authority allows for a wider array of human choices, while at the same time keeping power from overwhelming the social fabric. The main focus of Jouvenel’s political theory is the conservation of the elusive and implicit social tie which allows authority to play its unique role, while keeping it distinct from the more mediated forms of political power at the same time.

The Distinctive Common Good

AbstractThis paper defends the traditional distinctive notion of the common good against the claim that it is normatively redundant on the aggregative conception. The first two sections of the paper outline the different candidate conceptions of the common good and the normative role of the common good within natural law theories. The paper then considers some difficulties faced by the instrumental and aggregative conceptions, before developing an Aristotelian account of the distinctive conception of the common good and demonstrating its normative significance for a natural law account of political and legal authority.

Sizing the Radiator Control Valve Taking Account of Inner Authority

This paper presents an analytical method for determining the geometry of the radiator control valve plug to ensure the required regulation characteristic, taking account of the inner authority impact on the plug shape. It also includes regulation curves plotted with respect to the inner authority effect and ignoring it. In addition, the final shape of the regulation characteristic curves is presented for the control valve co-operating with a typical convection radiator.

Been Coming Through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky by Jack Glazier

Reviewed by: Been Coming Through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky by Jack Glazier Nedra Lee Jack Glazier, Been Coming Through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2015. 278 pp. Jack Glazier revels in the particularity of place in the newly published paperback edition of his book, Been Coming Through Some Hard Times: Race, History, and Memory in Western Kentucky (2015). Noting that each place is “constrained by the burden of its own history” (5), Glazier merges history and ethnography to present an insightful study of contemporary race relations in Hopkinsville, Christian County, Kentucky—a town once described by current residents as “unmarred by race relations” (190). Glazier weaves together local archival documents, secondary sources, and ethnographic observation to dismantle this myth of racial harmony. He provides an account of community formation and personal achievement as he recounts blacks’ efforts to secure autonomy amid systemic racial inequality. Yet, his study does more than present a counter-narrative to biased representations of the past. The book examines the battle between history and memory in an effort to demonstrate how both have been used to bolster as well as to contest racial inequalities in the region. Glazier’s book is inspired by the life of Idella Bass, a black woman who worked as a domestic in his house when he was a child. Bass was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1891 and came from a distinguished background. The daughter of former slaves, her father briefly attended Oberlin College and later established a successful laundry service in Indiana. While an accident dashed Bass’s dreams of becoming a nurse, her resolute character left an indelible mark on Glazier. Bass’s stories about Hopkinsville and her family’s efforts to overcome racism sparked his protracted interest in the western Kentucky region. Although he aimed to write a biography of the Bass family, limited historical information precluded him from [End Page 647] doing so. Glazier, instead, chose to detail a more comprehensive history of Hopkinsville and the greater christian county region to better illuminate the lives of the Basses and other black families. Despite the prevailing claims of racial harmony in western Kentucky, Glazier’s analysis reveals an area deeply divided by race. His book traces roughly 150 to 200 years of history in the region linking current racial inequalities to the area’s enslaved past. Chapter 1 immediately counters the myth that slavery was a modest and benevolent institution in Christian county. Glazier highlights christian county’s ascendancy as one of the US’s leading producers of tobacco and discusses the significance of enslaved labor to the area’s agricultural economy. He also lays out the book’s central premise, which is that the past has been modified and manipulated to both maintain and resist racial hierarchies. To characterize this process, Glazier uses the term “usable past,” which is described as an account of one’s history that contributes to “confident cultural self-awareness, making possible communal engagement and self-representation” (9). Glazier explains how the relationship between history and memory are important in this process as the development of a usable past involves the selective remembrance of certain people, places, and events. chapter 2 elucidates how history—often considered an authoritative and unquestionable account of the past—in Christian County has ignored the lives, experiences, and contributions of blacks in the area. Glazier surveys the unpublished diary of a white female slaveholder to show how whites perceived blacks through stereotypical tropes like the faithful slave. He elucidates how these images became the ideological foundation to rationalizations of slavery in western Kentucky. The portrayals in the state’s historiography of blacks as servile, childlike, and ignorant codified blacks’ exclusion and alienation by rendering them without a history and identity beyond white political and economic subjugation. Chapters 3 and 4 recoup black history from the margins by outlining blacks’ transition from slavery to freedom. These chapters highlight freed blacks’ agency and resilience despite the continuous uptick in racial violence following the conclusion of the Civil War. While Glazier highlights the failures of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the rise of Jim Crow...

Challenges and prospects of private sector participation in solid waste management in Dar es Salaam City, Tanzania

The objective of this research was to evaluate effectiveness of private sector participation in solid waste collection and transportation in Dar es Salaam City. The study covered 20 private service providers in municipalities of Kinondoni, Temeke and Ilala. Information was collected through questionnaires, interview guides, physical observation and field studies. Data were sought from 5 private companies, 15 Community Based Organizations, Dar es Salaam City Council, Waste Departments of Municipal authorities and local governments of ward and streets. The results show that private sector service providers collected and transported 9% of the 29,764 tons of solid wastes generated per week. They have also provided employment opportunities to over 350 people, who are helping to keep the city clean and increase national income through payment of various taxes. It was also observed that private sector operates in difficult conditions because of low cost recovery, the use of inferior wastes collection and transportation equipment, limited scheduling, short contract duration, inefficient system of refuse fee collection, an absence of planned wastes recycling systems, inaccessible roads and weak implementation of relevant municipal policies and by-laws. It was further noted that the success of the system will depend on accountability of municipal authorities by raising the awareness of the communities in order to improve willingness to pay for refuse fees and discourage illegal dumping of waste by individuals, enforcing municipal by-laws, and planning and promotion of environmentally friendly waste management practices.

Institutional Choice and Fragmented Citizenship in Forestry and Development Interventions in Bikoro Territory of the Democratic Republic of Congo

Substantive citizenship is the ability of an individual to influence those who govern. In order to assess this ‘ability’, this study examined the powers of sanction possessed by individuals or groups and the accountability mechanisms at their disposal in three villages in the Bikoro Territory of Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). More specifically, the article examined power relations and the accountability of local authorities involved in forestry and development interventions, in order to understand the effects of these interventions on substantive citizenship. The study found that forestry and development agencies chose to partner with identity-based customary authorities and interest-based non-governmental organizations in lieu of local state authorities and the absence of elected local government. These chosen institutions are not directly accountable to the local people, but their partnership with higher level forestry and development agencies gave them public powers over resources. This placed them in a position of authority over those who use these public resources in the absence of elected local government. While these empowered local institutions are open to some local influence, local people lack the ability to substantively influence the decisions made by these chosen local institutions – hence they cannot fully engage as citizens. This case study suggests that recognizing identity and/or interest-based local institutions by agencies currently promoting carbon forestry in the DRC exacerbates existing unequal power relations and further narrows inclusive local democracy and effective community participation in decision-making processes.

Beyond the thin blue line? A critical analysis of Scotland's Community Warden Scheme

ABSTRACTOver the past decade the national governments of the UK have repositioned ‘community safety’ as a priority area. The complexity of reducing real and perceived crime rates and levels of antisocial behaviour is widely accepted. This has inspired the development of numerous programmes aimed at delivering safer and stronger communities in specific contexts. One of the strategies promoted in Scotland is the Community Warden Scheme, which aims to provide a ‘uniformed, semi-official police presence’ at a community level. Scotland's Community Wardens characterise the growing trend towards the pluralisation of police service providers, as a myriad of actors constitute the ‘extended policing family’. Amidst the diversification and expansion of policing actors, issues surrounding public accountability and policing authority loom large. This paper aims to critically examine the role of Scotland's Community Wardens in relation to the broader policing landscape, drawing on empirical data generated in one city (Dundee). It will start by discussing the political and policy context surrounding the creation of the Community Warden Scheme, and describing the Wardens’ main roles and responsibilities. The paper will then outline two substantive issues facing the Wardens as highlighted by the primary research. First, the importance of developing a distinct professional identity will be explored. Second, the imperative of working alongside local policing teams will be discussed. In suggesting methods of good practice, the everyday challenges of navigating intra-professional expectations, inter-professional tensions and public accountability will be critically analysed.