Piecemeal Reform Research Articles

Policy amnesia and the promise of housing cooperatives: Finnish housing cooperativism from 1920 to 2020

Finland seems to suffer from a kind of ‘policy amnesia’ when it comes to the topic of housing cooperatives. Tracing back from 1920 to 2020, this article analyses waves of experimentation and political debate with housing cooperativism across both housing production and consumption. Supplementing a document analysis with expert interviews, it investigates which cooperatively-organized modes of housing provision were able to institutionalize in the Finnish housing system, when, and why this did (or did not) happen, and what roles they have played in the broader housing regime. It argues that, whilst building cooperatives grew into large and powerful actors in the Finnish housing system, cooperative tenure has never managed to expand beyond a niche mode of housing provision. This article investigates why, and suggests three interrelated factors: the relationship between housing cooperatives and Finland’s ideologically fragmented cooperative movement, the pragmatic and piecemeal reform of Finnish housing policy and politics, and the co-optation and ‘companization’ of cooperative identity.

Hurtful Digital Communications In Hong Kong: Stakeholder Accounts

Hurtful digital communications (HDC) is an umbrella term referring to a wide variety of text and image-based practices online, such as cyberbullying or the non-consensual distribution of intimate images (NCDII). They can cause significant harm to victims and, as elsewhere, these practices are on the rise in Hong Kong. This paper represents the first stage of a project aimed at developing a coherent, broad-spectrum response to that rise. It discusses nine interviews with stakeholder groups or representatives in Hong Kong, revealing commonalities and themes in their experiences with clients who have been victims of HDC. While Hong Kong has recently adopted piecemeal reform of criminal laws targeting certain HDC practices such as ‘up-skirting’, NCDII, and doxing, these interviews suggest that these reforms alone are unlikely prove effective. Amongst other things, the interviews reveal a desire by victims not simply for punishment but resolution and restitution. Other jurisdictions have responded to these desires through the adoption both of expanded civil actions and broader regulatory regimes. This paper sets the groundwork for justifying similar reforms in Hong Kong. Keywords: Law, Technology, Cyberbullying, NCDII, Communications, Hong Kong, Privacy, Tort, Regulation

Anna Doyle Wheeler: Gender Equality and the Need for a Cooperative Economic System

In the early nineteenth century, the utilitarian feminist Anna Doyle Wheeler generated still relevant analysis of the political economy of gender. The feminist literature credits Wheeler and her coauthor William Thompson as the first to appreciate that reproductive labor, however exploited, plays a central role in capitalism. Wheeler convincingly argues why piecemeal reform within capitalism cannot generate equality. The answer: a cooperative economy. This article formalizes two central propositions attributed to Anna Doyle Wheeler: (i) high levels of social welfare require gender equality; and (ii) gender equality requires a cooperative economic system. Conditional on interdependence and perceptions of happiness, there is a fundamental coherence underlying the first proposition. This study explicates the reasoning for the second proposition using Wheeler’s insights into social psychology and her understanding of cooperative institutions. Identifying and constructing decentralized, self-governing, and commonly owned institutions that embody Wheeler’s broad principles remains a challenge. HIGHLIGHTS Feminist philosopher Anna Doyle Wheeler argued gender equality requires cooperation. Meaningful gender equality demands a social psychology of enlarged self-interest. Cooperative institutions of common property must be decentralized and self-governed.

Secure from the World’s Contagions: Settlement House Summer Camping in the Progressive Era

AbstractThroughout the Progressive Era, settlement houses in the urban Northeast and Midwest operated robust summer camp programs for the children of their neighborhoods. Each summer, campers enjoyed two weeks of hiking, swimming, nature study, and relaxation. This article argues that summer camps exemplified the environmental agenda of settlement-house workers during the Progressive Era. Unlike smoke abatement, sanitation reform, or playground construction, which addressed isolated components of the urban environment, camps allowed them to articulate a deeply ecological critique of the industrial city. Settlement-house workers constructed camp landscapes and daily programming in response to problems endemic to atmosphere, city streets, and immigrants’ homes, providing children with a total environmental change while meanwhile pursuing slower and more piecemeal reforms back in the city. Settlement house leaders and other Progressive Era reformers discerned an intimate connection between landscapes and morality, which summer camps allowed them to address since they could reform individual behavior in addition to combatting structural inequities. Summer camps demonstrate that settlement-house workers’ environmental philosophy permeated their reform agendas, influencing social work and recreation in addition to politics and public health.

Property, Psyche, and the Theory of Tenancy: Independent and Interdependent Lease Law Covenants Through the Lens of Cultural Psychology

Is it property or contract? This question has perplexed scholars studying the residential lease for most of the last century. The present contribution combines the complementary perspectives of legal history and cultural psychology to clarify our theory of tenancy. From a historical perspective, I find that the oscillation of tenancy between competing doctrinal paradigms has resulted in a compromise solution rather than a coherent theory. While piecemeal reforms in the 1970s revised the doctrine of independent covenants, they did not provide a theoretical justification for increasing interdependence. From a psychological perspective, I suggest that such a theoretical justification may come from cultural psychology as the discipline that studies the behavioral effects of independent and interdependent self-construals. I provide the first comprehensive review of how this strand of psychology has informed legal issues in the last twenty years, and I extend this line of inquiry to include tenancy. I conclude that whether we regard tenancy as property or contract (i.e., as based on independent or interdependent covenants) will affect the amount of cooperation that we should expect from landlords and tenants. A theory of tenancy based on this insight would open up avenues for further research in law and society, comparative law, and contract theory.

White psychodrama

White psychodrama

Rebundling Institutions: How property rights and contracting institutions combine for growth

This study provides empirical evidence for the joint workings of property rights and contracting institutions as fundamental causes of growth. In a two-step panel estimation procedure that uses data from 130 countries over the period 2005–2015, I find that the income effects of legal reforms in property rights institutions vary with the prevalent quality of legal contracting institutions and vice versa. Decomposing the interaction effects for groups of countries with different quality combinations reveals that the quality fit of the two types of institutions matters for not only the size but also the direction of the interaction effects. In countries with absent or bad legal institutions, legal reforms considering only one type can even reduce income. Piecemeal reforms work best when they close quality gaps and they can backfire when the gap widens. The findings remain robust after tackling endogeneity issues, extending the period of analysis, estimating alternative models, and using alternative estimators. The findings imply that legal reforms have to be coordinated across different types of institutions and consider possible interferences with extra-legal rules and practices.

Challenges for Medicare and universal health care in Australia since 2000.

To identify the financing and policy challenges for Medicare and universal health care in Australia, as well as opportunities for whole-of-system strengthening. Review of publications on Medicare, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, and the universal health care system in Australia published 1 January 2000 - 14 August 2021 that reported quantitative or qualitative research or data analyses, and of opinion articles, debates, commentaries, editorials, perspectives, and news reports on the Australian health care system published 1 January 2015 - 14 August 2021. Program-, intervention- or provider-specific articles, and publications regarding groups not fully covered by Medicare (eg, asylum seekers, prisoners) were excluded. MEDLINE Complete, the Health Policy Reference Centre, and Global Health databases (all via EBSCO); the Analysis & Policy Observatory, the Australian Indigenous HealthInfoNet, the Australian Public Affairs Information Service, Google, Google Scholar, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) websites. The problems covered by the 76 articles included in our review could be grouped under seven major themes: fragmentation of health care and lack of integrated health financing, access of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to health services and essential medications, reform proposals for the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, the burden of out-of-pocket costs, inequity, public subsidies for private health insurance, and other challenges for the Australian universal health care system. A number of challenges threaten the sustainability and equity of the universal health care system in Australia. As the piecemeal reforms of the past twenty years have been inadequate for meeting these challenges, more effective, coordinated approaches are needed to improve and secure the universality of public health care in Australia.

In the maelstrom of crises: The European Union and the ‘Zeitenwende’

This essay aims to promote discussion on fundamental reforms of the European Union (EU). Its thesis is that the global turning point triggered by multiple crises affects the entirety of the EU architecture and that reforms can therefore not be limited to piecemeal reforms in individual areas. Methodologically, the essay takes an ideology-critical approach with what is commonly referred to as ?neoliberalism? at its centre. As a result, the essay draws a Union that gains its own sovereignty through democratic reforms in decisionmaking.

“What Blood Unites, the Sea Shall Not Divide”: Bohemian Day at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893

“What Blood Unites, the Sea Shall Not Divide”: Bohemian Day at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893

White-Collar Crimes and Corruption at Border Crossings in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq: Causes, Effffects, and Challenges for Reform

This paper examines border crossing corruption in Kurdistan in northern Iraq. Based on data obtained from key informants, government documents, peer review literature and grey literature, the study uncovered widespread white-collar fraud by criminals and corruption in all four formal, and all five informal, border crossings in Kurdistan. These criminals and corruption take two forms: collusion between factional groups and private companies; and white-collar fraud committed by criminals. The unique feature of these criminals and corruption is that it is the result of an officially sanctioned system of sharing management of border control posts between Kurdistan’s two main political parties - the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Democratic Party of Kurdistan (PDK) – i.e. the politicization/privatization of border control governance. Privatization in this context attracted criticism due to abuse and inefficiency. For the most part, the abuse focuses on consequences of privatization. Moreover, politicization has drawn the private sector into its web of corruption thereby creating a blend of politicization and privatization wherein officials and owner of firms have used legal means to protect their own interests thereby exercising an artificial monopoly and privilege. The total estimated sum of revenue lost to the government of Kurdistan because of these criminals and corruption is more than $US 200 million per month . The present paper discusses two alternative ways of dealing with these criminals and corruption: either radical change to end border control corruption completely by structural and/or cultural change; or piecemeal reform to reduce the extent of the damage caused by border control corruption. While the long-term aim should be radical change in order to eliminate the problem, a more realistic objective is piecemeal reform in order to manage the problem by minimizing its effects.

Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Spiritual Socialists: Religion and the American Left

Conceptions of Utopia in Modern Liberal Thought: Is There a Liberal Utopia?

ABSTRACT This article considers the relationship between modern classical liberalism and utopian theory. The main question we address is: How have key liberal theorists over the past century received utopian visions of the economy, politics, and society? The development of liberalism is commonly associated with strident anti-utopianism, a perception contraindicated by more recent developments in political economy and philosophy. Accommodative liberal engagements with utopia are evident within philosophical discussions addressing the significance of group diversity within free societies, and of maintaining social accord among peoples with divergent beliefs, practices, and other modes of living. This development aligns with a revitalized liberal political economy emphasis upon experimentation and process, which appears congruent with similar tendencies in utopian theory over recent decades. Even liberal critics of utopia, such as Friedrich Hayek, described their own grounded visions of either utopian society, or of piecemeal reforms in a utopian direction. In this article it is argued feasible intellectual opportunities do exist to reconcile liberal theory and utopian conceptions.

Water as a driver of sustainable recovery: a Road map for Central Asia . Part I. Essential structural and institutional reforms to achieve economic and financial sustainability of the water sector

The article summarizes discussions by Central Asian and international decision makers, experts and researchers during two webinars held in the framework of the Programme “Water as a driver of sustainable recovery: economic, institutional and strategic aspects of water resources management in Central Asia”. The economic crisis caused by the covid-19 pandemic, absorbing scarce resources and capacities, highlighted the importance of implementing long overdue economic reforms. Piecemeal reforms focusing on segments of the water sector are important but the water sector is an integral part of the economy as a whole. Accelerating structural and institutional reforms of the economy would allow the water sector to achieve economic and financial sustainability.

The power of the people: the meaning of kratos in dēmokratia

In this paper, I reconstruct the notion of kratos as a unique and distinguishable exercise of political power. Using examples from 5th- and 4th-century Attic tragedy, Old Comedy, and forensic oratory, I show how kratos was used in Athenian cultural and political discourse to convey the irrefutability of a claim, the recognition of someone’s prevailing over another, and the sense of having the last word—all of which makes kratic power dependent upon its own continued demonstrability. I argue that the peculiarly performative character of kratos has little or no role within contemporary democratic thinking because the agency of the dēmos is largely mediated through the mechanisms of electoral success and constitutional rights. Nevertheless—and regardless of whether they are ultimately successful in achieving their stated political aims—the spontaneous, organisationally diffuse protests operating extra-institutionally under the banners of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter reveal how the attempted ‘domestication’ of kratos, and the sublimation of its peculiar power into piecemeal reform, was never a realistic or satisfactory answer for democratic discontent.

A Gentle Book by a Gentleman


 
 
 Issue: Mar-Apr 2021
 This book is a useful read, despite its moderation, because, so few books have been written about India’s contemporary political economy. Montek’s book Backstage offers a clearer picture of an important time and fills in the gaps on some of the characters involved. Montek’s penchant for comprehensive rather than piece-meal reform is a good takeaway for a younger generation of economic policy makers.
 
 

The EU Bank Insolvency Framework: Could Less Be More?

The framework for bank crisis management in the Banking Union (BU) complies with multiple criteria. Each of these criteria is based on a sound policy rationale; however, when combined, they can generate unintended consequences that undermine the effectiveness of the system, highlighting a case of fallacy of composition. This paper suggests that a piecemeal reform is not adequate to tackle the framework’s shortcomings. A broader effort is required to streamline the current criteria into a single rulebook, achieving effectiveness through simplification. The successful experience of the US framework for bank failure management provides a useful benchmark. It shows that the generalized, if not exclusive, reliance on a single, clearly defined, easily measurable and quickly actionable criterion – the Least Cost Test – makes it possible to offer full protection to taxpayers and to contain the destruction of value caused by bank failures, thereby safeguarding the economy. We suggest that its adoption by the BU would help to frame a common approach to failing banks of all sizes and would provide a unifying force and a solution to the geographic and institutional fragmentation of the current set-up.

Behind Veterans’ Protests: Passive and Piecemeal Policy-Making in China

Veterans have become one of China’s largest and most vocal protest groups. Studies on the country’s veterans have focused on their grievances and have identified these individuals as “unlucky” victims of economic reforms who suffer because of the state’s inadequate attention and local governments’ poor policy implementation. However, this article argues that the difficulties veterans face are the product of piecemeal policies adopted by central authorities. These policies have been inherited from the Maoist era’s principle of local resettlement of demobilized soldiers. Local governments have tried to reduce the heavy burden this resettlement policy imposes on them. Drawing on a review of a large number of policy documents, as well as interviews with dozens of veterans, this article presents a comprehensive picture of the resettlement system and the way piecemeal reforms have spurred various forms of unrest among veterans. It also shows that the differential treatment of various veteran groups in similar situations, as a result of the fragmented system and accumulated policy changes, has exacerbated veterans’ grievances. Finally, the article explores the conundrum of reforming the resettlement system. While the local resettlement of veterans is guaranteed and remains a cornerstone of civil/party-military relations, it has become impossible for the government to locally resettle all veterans. The resettlement system’s internal fragmentation also allows different authorities to shirk responsibility and eventually puts the burden on the veterans themselves. The elusive reforms proposed by the current leadership are unlikely to resolve these tensions.

Vision and Action: Two Sides of the Coin for Systemic Change in Educational Systems

Systemic change is far more difficult than piecemeal reforms because it requires far more interrelated and interdependent sets of changes to occur. Systemic change has two potential areas of failure: 1) the change process (action) may never reach full implementation of the new system, and 2) the new system (vision) may not be well designed. This paper describes Reigeluth and Karnopp’s (2020) compilation of a growing body of research-based knowledge about systemic change in education that includes both sides of the coin: 1) the vision, for which they describe 25 principles organized into six core ideas, and 2) the action by which the vision is created and implemented. The action knowledge base includes guidance about values, principles, and both sequential and continuous activities. The sequential activities are different for a school district than for an independent school. We define "independent school" as one that is not part of a district or other organization but may be a public school.

Queer utopias and queer criminology

Drawing on the concept of utopia to reflect upon the emerging field of queer criminology and José Esteban Muñoz’s account of queer theory as essentially utopian, we draw two conclusions. First, we suggest that queer criminology is currently limited by tinkering at the edges with piecemeal reforms instead of focussing on radical, wholesale changes, and second, that queer theory contains within it the potential for a more holistic reimagining of the social world. In doing so, we question rigid cis/trans binaries and reject accounts of trans/gender that ignore the role of structural harm. We draw on Ernst Bloch’s concepts of ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ utopia to suggest that while queer criminology has succeeded in producing largely ‘abstract’ utopias, it struggles in translating these into ‘concrete’ ones. By introducing examples of trans literary utopias as potential transformative cultural forms, however, we consider the potential of queer theory for realising ‘concrete’ utopia through a more radical rethinking of the social world.