Incumbent Interests Research Articles

Hybrid Regionalism in Africa

Abstract Since its establishment, the African Union (AU) takes on an active role in regional security matters through different types of interventions. These interventions, however, remain undertheorized. This paper argues that African hybrid regionalism, which combines problem-solving and regime-serving logics of cooperation, shapes the AU’s intervention practice in specific ways. To this end, I first theorize how the parallel presence of these logics shapes AU interventions before probing the empirical validity by studying coercive interventions undertaken by the AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) between 2005 and 2021. For this purpose, I employ methods of content analysis to systematically code all publicly available meeting documents issued by the PSC. The results demonstrate that the AU strives to prevent and manage crises through interventions but does so in ways that protect or promote incumbent regimes, either by producing direct benefits for them or, when their actions contribute to the crisis, by avoiding head-on confrontations. This suggests careful balancing of the two main impetuses in African security regionalism, namely solving transnational problems and serving the interests of incumbents.

Masters of the machinery: The politics of economic modelling within European Union energy policy

Economic modelling plays a major role in the development, justification and evaluation of energy policies. However, there has been little investigation of how political dynamics systematically influence these models' development and outputs, or the implications for energy strategies, targets and interventions. Using in-depth interviews with 24 European modellers and policyworkers, we illuminate the politics of economic modelling within European Union (EU) energy policymaking, focusing on dynamics of contestation, differentiated influence and power relations within models' a) framing of questions and problems; b) framing of scenarios and solutions; c) structural assumptions and d) definition of quantitative data inputs. We then consider deeper questions of e) access and exclusion, showing how modelling is used to silence critical voices and reinforce incumbent interests. We argue that understanding this politics of modelling is crucial to the implementation of sustainable energy transitions. We conclude with recommendations for researchers and policyworkers seeking to promote the use of alternative/innovative models in energy policy (within and beyond the EU), centring on reflexivity; recognition; and relationship-building. Developing multi-sectoral ‘communities of practice’ around innovative modelling approaches is vital in challenging a vicious circle of evidence and policy that legitimises business-as-usual in a dangerously warming world.

Balancing cost and justice concerns in the energy transition: comparing coal phase-out policies in Germany and the UK

ABSTRACT Europe’s two largest economies – Germany and the UK – are phasing out coal from electricity production as part of European efforts to fulfil increased climate policy ambitions that require comprehensive energy system transitions. German and UK governments varied in the ways they sought support from diverse societal interests to make the transition socially acceptable and politically feasible. Drawing on 22 expert interviews and process-tracing methods, this paper compares and explains how political and economic institutional differences influenced efforts to balance energy transition concerns, like speed and cost-effectiveness with justice for companies, workers and communities most adversely affected by the transition. We find that the increasing attention to just transition perspectives after the Paris Agreement affected the design of coal phase-out processes in different ways in the two countries. Just transition concerns were given priority by policymakers in Germany, but more so if they overlapped with the interests of incumbents. In the end, politically powerful stakeholders dominated the policy outcome. In the UK, policymakers and stakeholders gave only weak attention to just transition concerns, mainly because coal’s market position had collapsed. Coal interests did not have strong representation in the decision-making process. But we find that just transition concerns are likely to gain more attention in the UK because a more challenging transition away from gas will take place over the next two decades. Key policy insights Policymakers must balance the objective of a fast decarbonization process against two other important concerns: cost-effectiveness and a just transition. Political-economic institutional design and capacity shape the extent to which just transition concerns are given weight in coal phase-out processes. State capacity for including just transition concerns in coal phase-out processes is higher when political and economic institutions strongly mediate government-stakeholder interaction in the policy process, and broad stakeholder participation increases the political feasibility and legitimacy of policy change. In Germany, the government’s attention to just transition concerns was strong because broad stakeholder representation in the formal process, and transition assistance policies to target potential losers in the transition, became crucial to enhance the legitimacy of coal phase-out policies. In the UK, cost-effectiveness trumped just transition concerns in the coal phase-out process, but just transition issues have increasing salience and will likely become pertinent in the upcoming gas phase-out process because more jobs and key economic interests are at stake. Our findings are relevant for policymakers in countries struggling with balancing speed, cost-effectiveness and just transition concerns in similar transition processes: phasing out coal, gas, or oil from their energy system. The findings may also inform future energy transition research.

Towards Sustainable Innovations - essay in memoriam of Andries Nentjes

Aim: This paper assesses theoretically and empirically three key factors for sustainable development within context of debates about economy and environment: autonomous technological change, induced technological change and barriers of entry to innovations.
 
 Design/research methods: The paper covers a literature review on strong versus weak sustainability, followed by an explanation of autonomous technological change. Statistical analysis with literature review on induced technological change due to consumers’ and policy demands for sustainable innovations, as well as literature review on policy support for the incumbent interests that rival sustainable innovations is provided. The information used is largely based on two chapters in the book on sustainable innovations (Krozer 2015), and presented in the context of long scientific cooperation with the late Andries Nentjes.
 
 Conclusion/findings: The economic theoretical debates are hardly relevant for policies on sustainable innovations, because political views are inconsistent with observations and change during fluctuations in economic outcomes. The main conclusion is that autonomous technological change is the driver of sustainable innovations. Present policies pose barriers of entry to sustainable innovations, where the global value of support for vested interest exceeds the market potential for induced technological change due to demands of policies and consumers put together.
 
 Originality/value of the paper: The study contribution to understanding of autonomous and induced technological change, showing that shifting policy support away from the incumbent interests towards sustainable innovations is key for sustainable development.

Incumbent lobbying as a barrier to forward-looking regulation: The case of demand-side response in the GB capacity market for electricity

The current transformation of energy systems around the world is fundamentally a policy-driven process, unlike previous socio-technical transitions. This article focuses on the challenges of constructing forward-looking policies for sustainable energy transitions in the presence of powerful incumbent interests, through an in-depth study of how the emerging option of demand-side response (DSR) was incorporated into the Capacity Market (CM) for electricity in Great Britain over the period 2010 to 2014. Drawing on extensive documentation related to the development of the CM rules and interviews with participants and close observers of the process, the paper provides an unusually detailed assessment of the influence of companies with large electricity generation assets. The evidence presented supports the hypotheses that these companies had influence through deploying public facing strategies, that they had been able to draw on close networks of contacts and networks with senior policy makers, and that the latter had internalised the ideas and interests of the former. Despite counter-lobbying by DSR firms and non-governmental organisations, institutional arrangements gave major generators an advantage in terms of access. The paper concludes by recommending the establishment of independent bodies to propose policies and monitor the process of their development during energy system transformations.

Political economies of climate change

Political economy approaches across the social sciences provide powerful explanations for important dynamics within the global response to climate change. This article discusses in particular how they provide explanations of the social origins of greenhouse gas emissions, the dominant policy and governance responses to climate change, recurrent political conflicts over these responses, and the patterns of bargaining between states, businesses, and other actors. Underlying these dynamics are a set of contradictions or tensions between the character of capitalism as a social system and the demands of decarbonizing the global economy, specifically: between the imperative for growth that constrains and shapes responses; concerning the power of large transnational businesses and other incumbent interests to block responses; and over the embeddedness of carbon emissions in daily life. The article explores the implications of these contradictions as well as some of the important theoretical debates about the limits of political economy approaches.This article is categorized under: Policy and Governance > Multilevel and Transnational Climate Change Governance Climate Economics > Economics and Climate Change

False Alarmism: Technological Disruption and the U.S. Labor Market, 185002015

This report reviews U.S. occupational trends from 1850 to 2015, drawing on Census data compiled by the University of Minnesota’s demographic research program, the Minnesota Population Center, to compare the changes in occupational job levels from decade to decade. We also assign a code to each occupation to judge whether increases or decreases in employment in a given decade were likely due to technological progress or other factors. Overall, three main findings emerge from this analysis. First, contrary to popular perception, rather than increasing over time, the rate of occupational churn in recent decades is at the lowest level in American history — at least as far back as 1850. Occupational churn peaked at over 50 percent in the two decades from 1850 to 1870 (meaning the absolute value sum of jobs in occupations growing and occupations declining was greater than half of total employment at the beginning of the decade), and it fell to its lowest levels in the last 15 years — to around just 10 percent. When looking only at absolute job losses in occupations, again the last 15 years have been comparatively tranquil, with just 70 percent as many losses as in the first half of the 20th century, and a bit more than half as many as in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1990s. Second, many believe that if innovation only accelerates even more then new jobs in new industries and occupations will make up for any technology-created losses. But the truth is that growth in already existing occupations is what more than makes up the difference. In no decade has technology directly created more jobs than it has eliminated. Yet, throughout most of the period from 1850 to present, the U.S. economy as a whole has created jobs at a robust rate, and unemployment has been low. This is because most job creation that is not explained by population growth has stemmed from productivity-driven increases in purchasing power for consumers and businesses. Such innovation allows workers and firms to produce more, so wages go up and prices go down, which increases spending, which in turn creates more jobs in new occupations, though more so in existing occupations (from cashiers to nurses and doctors). There is simply no reason to believe that this dynamic will change in the future for the simple reason that consumer wants are far from satisfied. Third, in contrast to the popular view that technology today is destroying more jobs than ever, our findings suggest that is not the case. The period from 2010 to 2015 saw approximately 6 technology-related jobs created for every 10 lost, which was the highest ratio — meaning lowest share of jobs lost to technology — of any period since 1950 to 1960. Many believers in the inaccurately named so-called “fourth industrial revolution” will argue that this relative tranquility is just the calm before a coming storm of robot- and artificial-intelligence-driven job destruction. But projections based on this view — including from such venerable sources as the World Economic Forum and Oxford University — are either immaterial or inaccurate. Policymakers should take away three key points from this analysis: 1. Take a deep breath, and calm down. Labor market disruption is not abnormally high; it’s at an all-time low, and predictions that human labor is just one tech “unicorn” away from redundancy are likely vastly overstated, as they always have been. 2. If there is any risk for the future, it is that technological change and resulting productivity growth will be too slow, not too fast. Therefore, rather than try to slow down change, policymakers should do everything possible to speed up the rate of creative destruction. Otherwise, it will be impossible to raise living standards faster than the current snail’s pace of progress. Among other things, this means not giving in to incumbent interests (of companies or workers) who want to resist disruption. 3. Policymakers should do more to improve labor-market transitions for workers who lose their jobs. That is true regardless of the rate of churn or whether policy seeks to retard or accelerate it. Likewise, it doesn’t matter whether the losses stem from short-term business-cycle downturns or from trends that lead to natural labor-market churn. While this report lays out a few broad proposals, a forthcoming ITIF report will lay out a detailed and actionable policy agenda to help workers better adjust to labor-market churn.

From Sustainability to Transformation: Dynamics and Diversity in Reflexive Governance of Vulnerability.

This paper slightly amends a concluding chapter in the above book on ‘vulnerability in technological cultures’. It offers a personal view of key governance implications of this fruitful concept. Picking up earlier arguments, technological vulnerability is seen in a dual fashion – both in terms of the vulnerability of particular technological trajectories to subversion by powerful incumbent interests, as well as the vulnerability of societies and ecologies to the effects of technology. Either way (in common with other kinds of vulnerability), those interests which tend to be most adversely affected by these dynamics, are those that are already most disadvantaged. The argument begins by pointing out that governance institutions and discourses around Sustainability hold particular significance for this challenge. By contrast with prevailing (simply emergent) notions of progress, Sustainability constitutes political space and traction for more assertively publicly-deliberated normative frames. These in turn help enable greater social agency concerning the appropriate orientations for innovation pathways that pay greater respect to qualities of ecological integrity, social equity and human wellbeing. Beyond these normative dimensions, however, Sustainability also focuses attention on diverse possible dynamics of vulnerability. Distinguishing between styles of agency variously conceived as controlling or responsive, and temporal patterns perceivable as episodic shock or cumulative stress, four distinct dynamic properties are resolved (stability, durability, resilience and robustness). Each holds contrasting practical implications for governance institutions and instruments. But all address vulnerabilities in a fashion that assumes a normative interest in maintaining a given trajectory. The contrasting face of vulnerability also requires attention to an alternative normative aim: that of disrupting a given trajectory. Here, the same four dimensions of agency and temporality highlight four corresponding dynamics of disruption (transduction, transition, transilience and transformation). If governance is to escape from the powerful conditioning effects of incumbent interests, this framework may offer a basis for greater critical reflexivity over contrasting normativities and dynamics of vulnerability. So, the paper ends with a brief exploration of the implications for three interlinked aspects of diversity – involving the ‘opening up’ of ways in which technological trajectories are: epistemically understood; normatively appreciated; and ontologically performed in practice. It is argued that taking the dual faces of technological vulnerability seriously, requires attending more symmetrically to these essential conditions for more distributed and relational forms of social reflexivity. Only by this means, is it possible to escape not only the diverse ways in which incumbent concentrations of power close down technological trajectories themselves, but also the plural ways in which the general dynamics of technological vulnerability can even be imagined.

An Outline of Risk-Informed Interference Assessment

In judging whether to allow new service rules, a regulator has to balance the interests of incumbents, new entrants and the public. The trade-off between the benefits of a new service and the risks to incumbents has to date been essentially qualitative. This short paper proposes the use of quantitative risk analysis to assess the harm that may be caused by changes in radio service rules. Risk analysis considers the likelihood-consequence combinations for multiple hazard scenarios, and complements a “worst case” analysis that considers the single scenario with the most severe consequence, regardless of its likelihood. Risk-informed interference assessment is the systematic, quantitative analysis of interference hazards caused by the interaction between radio systems. Such an assessment has three major steps: 1. Make an inventory of all significant harmful interference hazard modes. 2. Define a consequence metric to characterize the severity of hazards. 3. Assess the likelihood and consequence of each hazard mode. Quantitative risk assessment can: • provide a common currency for comparing different interference scenarios and assessments; • enhance the completeness of analysis and increase the chances of identifying unexpected harmful interference mechanisms; • provide objective information to policy decision makers balancing the benefits of a new service and its adverse technical impact on incumbents. Implementing quantitative risk assessment requires a change in culture, and will take time. A regulator should therefore start small, but start soon: • Develop know-how in the agency and the wider community, for example through a lecture series on modern risk management, and — if there is an on-going education facility like the FCC University — by offering courses to staff on statistics and risk-management. • Use quantitative risk assessment in its own work, and publish the analyses and results. • Provide quantitative guidelines on unquestionably acceptable and unacceptable interference risks, respectively, e.g. as likelihood-consequence regions on a risk chart. • Pilot this approach in selected site-specific license waiver proceedings.

Making Law with Lawsuits: Understanding Judicial Review in Campaign Finance Policy

Campaign finance law presents quite a puzzle: it is an area of federal policy very closely tied to the interests of incumbents in the political branches, and yet it is controlled to a great extent by unelected federal court judges. While we tend to assume that First Amendment considerations drive judicial review here, scholars have yet to account for political leaders’ decisions to establish federal court jurisdiction in the first place, allowing lawsuits that either challenge or enforce the law. Can it be that Congress went to great lengths to write statutes regulating the use of money in elections, but had nothing to say about how and to what extent courts would review the law? This article examines the role of political leaders in judicializing campaign finance policy. In a survey of nearly a century of law, and in a close analysis of the legislative record, I make a number of surprising findings. I discover that there has been great variation in judicial review over this history and that it correlates directly with the choices activists and political leaders have made to mobilize legal institutions in the making of campaign finance policy. Moreover, I find that political leaders have maintained the upper hand in this: where the efforts of independent policy activists ran counter to their interests (as they did for a brief period prior to Watergate), legislators quickly changed jurisdiction rules to foreclose the groups’ access to federal courts. But, even as they restricted public interest litigation in the field, legislators actually moved to judicialize the policy still more – and continued to do so even after the Supreme Court substantially altered the law with its Buckley v. Valeo ruling. In fact, from 1974 onward, the judiciary’s power to interpret, enforce and, ultimately, remake policy has been deliberately delegated to it by Congress. This history reveals that campaign finance reform has long been a process of making law with lawsuits, where courts enjoy significant discretion to revise policy not primarily because of their own activism, but because political leaders have given them the job.

Public engagement in climate change – Disjunctions, tensions and blind spots in the UK

There is much talk about engaging the public in climate change mitigation and adaptation in the UK and elsewhere. Governments rush to demand greater engagement of the public in tackling climate change and delivering sustainable futures. The importance that public engagement has gained as part of the UK climate agenda begs the questions of what is actually behind this call and what are the implications. This paper analyses the rationale for public engagement as enshrined in major policy documents. This rationale is clearly instrumental in that citizens are expected to engage by adopting the 'right attitude', by performing prescribed behaviours, and by consenting to proposed measures. Using recent cases of climate change mitigation and adaptation practice the paper discusses the implications of such an approach to public engagement. The paper concludes that until the manifold disjunctions between climate related policy agendas and their rationales for engagement are explicitly addressed citizen engagement will be serving incumbent interests rather than contributing to socially sustainable and democratic decision-making

Digital content unleashed

The world in which consumers use a variety of isolated devices to enjoy pre-packaged entertainment delivered over isolated networks and legacy retail channels is beginning to fade away. In the world that is emerging, consumers are empowered to choose the way they purchase, use and manage their media. Increasingly, they are taking advantage of these opportunities. While the convergence of different networks, the enabling of networked and broadband consumer electronics devices and the vast array of content available to buyers are all creating a new generation of empowered consumers, however, ABI Research finds that many are having a difficult time accessing and managing this content in any cohesive way. Some major players have worked to create solutions to help consumers access and manage the wide variety of content at their disposal through tightly integrated hardware, software and service packages. The best example is Apple with its iPod/iTunes pairing. While the iPod/iTunes ecosystem is perhaps the closest thing to an organized approach to digital media, as more users look to connect to content anywhere at anytime, they will find technology barriers, old frameworks and business interests of incumbents' appearing to prevent this. These barriers essentially create friction in the entertainment experience, slowing the consumer's anytime-anywhere experience and possibly preventing it all together. This white paper examines consumer behavior today in terms of pay media, online content, digital media storage and management. We will look at how new enabling technologies will drive adoption of new use-cases among an increasingly large number of users, and how this will create a need for more centralized management of their digital media. Finally, we make some predictions for 2012 and assess the possibilities of achieving a friction-free media world that will ultimately benefit consumers, content creators, distributors and end-user system manufacturers.

Reconstructing Criminality in Latin America

Reconstructing Criminality in Latin America

Electricity sector restructuring in Belgium during the 90's

Since 1925, the Belgian liberal statutory framework, combined with weak supervision by public authorities, allowed the Tractebel conglomerate and its subsidiary Electrabel to strengthen in the nineties their dominant position in all parts of the Belgian electricity market. The implementation of the EU internal market of electricity directive speeded up the process of market liberalisation. However, the urgency of the law-giving process and the traditionally overwhelming power of the incumbent interests of the Tractebel conglomerate will bring about a merely formalistic opening of the Belgian electricity market.