Policy Deliberations Research Articles

Plural Valuation of Land and Insights for Achieving Sustainable Outcomes in Large-Scale Land Acquisition Projects

Large-scale land acquisition projects by foreign investors, also known as “land grabbing,” raise difficult questions about the processes of valuing land in Sub-Saharan Africa that the current literature does not sufficiently explore. Land acquisitions can help developing countries like Tanzania achieve their economic and development goals. Nonetheless, it can also threaten local livelihoods and well-being due to displacement, lack of access to natural capital, and conflicts between land users. Empirical evidence is limited on how local contexts affect the recognition and incorporation of multiple values that people hold about land into decisions on land acquisition projects in Tanzania. Plural valuation (PV) is needed to design more comprehensive and deliberative policy instruments that enhance nature’s contributions to people. This empirical study uses sociocultural valuation approaches to assess the diverse values of land in the Bagamoyo district of Tanzania, impacts of EcoEnergy land acquisition project on local livelihoods, and contextual factors that enable or hinder incorporating PV into decisions. The findings suggest that synergies and conflicting values of land exist, and PV can serve as a negotiation support tool to reconcile the differences and land conflicts. The success of PV relies on the (1) extent of partnership and participation, (2) design of asset valuation process, (3) stakeholder goals, and (4) sociopolitical context. Currently, the risks of land acquisition projects outweigh the benefits to people in rural Tanzania. However, to realize the sustainable and equitable flow of the contributions of land to Tanzanians, the government should consider improving the valuation processes by (i) fostering recognition of neglected voices and marginalized people, (ii) rectifying power imbalances and injustices that result from current land valuation processes, (iii) reinforcing customary land rights and compensation policies, and (iv) adhering to the principle of free, prior, and informed consent.

Contesting Forms of Knowledge in Policy Deliberation Lessons from Disaster Coping Policies in Thailand

This article presents the case of policy deliberation on disaster coping strategies in Bangkok, Thailand. It demonstrates the challenges scientists faced when they sought to influence policymaking on flood mitigation. The article demonstrates different forms of knowledge that shaped Bangkok’s flood policy, and explains how lay knowledge promoted by farmers, local communities, and Buddhist monks were successful in persuading policymakers and the wider public in their preferred policy option. Meanwhile, scientific knowledge failed to make their case in public forums, and on some occasions, even alienated Thai citizens. The article concludes by drawing lessons on how scientific and lay knowledge can better contest as well as connect their claims to enrich the process and outcomes of public deliberation on disaster coping policy.

Does Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Reduce Food Insecurity among Households with Children? Evidence from the Current Population Survey.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) is designed to improve household diet and food security—a pressing problem confronting low-income families in the United States. Previous studies on the issue often ignored the methodological issue of endogenous program participation. We revisit this important issue by estimating a simultaneous equation system with ordinal household food insecurity. Data are drawn from the 2009–2011 Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement (CPS-FSS), restricted to SNAP-eligible households with children. Our results add to the stocks of empirical findings that SNAP participation ameliorates food insecurity among adults only, but increases the probabilities of low and very low food security among children. These contradictory results indicate that our selection approach with a single cross section is only partially successful, and that additional efforts are needed in further analyses of this complicated issue, perhaps with longitudinal data. Socio-demographic variables are found to affect food-secure households and food-insecure households differently, but affect SNAP nonparticipants and participants in the same direction. The state policy tools, such as broad-based categorical eligibility (BBCE) and simplified reporting, can encourage SNAP participation and thus ameliorate food insecurity. Our findings can inform policy deliberations.

COVID-19: observations for contemporary strategists

ABSTRACT This article offers strategic observations about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. It assesses whether the disease outbreak represents an intelligence failure. It describes how the global response to COVID-19 is an example of the so-called “spiral model” in action, whereby policy deliberations are overtaken by events. The analysis also assess how recent experience casts new light on assumptions common to the literature on biological weapons. It addresses the possibility that COVID-19 could spark a rise in cosmopolitan attitudes globally and offers reservations about using the COVID-19 experience as a future template for global pandemic response.

Opportunities and barriers to forest biomass energy: A case study of four U.S. states

Forest bioenergy is discussed in the literature as a potential mechanism to achieve multiple forest management and energy policy goals, and remains the subject of state and federal policy deliberations. In practice, forest bioenergy faces challenges from wavering public support and the availability of increasingly lower cost natural gas, wind, and solar energy. Here, we investigate the experience of stakeholders with forest bioenergy systems in four states—California, Florida, Minnesota, and New Hampshire—to better understand present-day barriers to and opportunities for continued operation of existing facilities and the potential deployment of new capacity. Building on insight generated from interviews with key informants at the national level, we conducted a comparative case study based on facility documents and interviews with facility managers, utility representatives, federal agency representatives, clean energy advocates, and other relevant stakeholders. We find that forest bioenergy often lacks a natural constituency willing or able to advocate on its behalf in policy deliberations, and that even proven facilities are vulnerable to fluctuations in state and federal policy. We conclude that shifting, uneven support for forest bioenergy impedes durable policy solutions, a condition that likely translates to limited opportunities for additional large, utility-scale facilities at the present time.

Book Review: Community Radio Policies in South Asia by Preeti Raghunath

Padmaja Shaw reviews “Community Radio Policies in South Asia” by Preeti Raghunath. Raghunath applies “deliberative policy ecology approach” to study how policy frameworks evolved in four South Asian nations, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Raghunath argues that the “deliberative policy ecology approach” is rooted in emancipatory politics that brings in the stakeholders at the bottom of the policy food chain. Raghunath’s intricate map of policy formulation in post-colonial societies is an engaging revelation of the continued contradictions between the developmentalist instincts of the state and the push of grassroots voices to claim their legitimate space in decision making.

Deliberative representation: how Chinese authorities enhance political representation by public deliberation

Political representation centers on who claims to represent what and the extent to which the audience feels being represented. The mainstream body of scholarship on political representation has focused on electoral-based representation in the context of liberal-democratic settings. China provides an excellent case to study the phenomenon of non-electoral forms of political representation. This article seeks to address the question of how do the Chinese authorities enhance political representation by public deliberation in social welfare policy? Drawing on first-hand official documents and interview accounts from fieldwork conducted in Guangxi and Hubei, as well as secondary data sources, this article undertakes a mechanism-based comparative case study of these two localities, examining the different forms of citizen deliberation in poverty alleviation programs. It reveals that the party regime has developed an increasingly sophisticated set of strategies in establishing representation by deliberative consultation. Furthermore, two distinctive forms of deliberative representation, the state-authoritative model and the light-empowered model can be discerned from the different deliberative participatory experiences of Guangxi and Hubei. The deliberative elements introduced into the poverty alleviation program demonstrate that with a deeper and more consequential engagement of the citizens in welfare policy decision making, there can be an empowered form of political representation generated even in a non-electoral setting.

REFLECTIONS ON MONETARY POLICY AND ITS FUTURE

[...]I should say that there was no greater single authority who impacted our policy deliberations when I served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee than John Taylor. [...]the balance sheet can certainly be injurious to future taxpayers, and it is one more way that the Fed's independence could be compromised. [...]when the 2008 financial crisis occurred, the Fed asked for the power to pay interest on excess reserves. The CBO can't foresee a year in the next decade where the national debt won't rise faster than national income, which is a frightening prospect. [...]the Fed has a massive balance sheet with the assets it has bought, and it has borrowed the money from commercial banks to pay for those assets.

Dealing with the epistemic-democratic tension in policy-making. Institutional design choices for multi-layered democratic innovations

ABSTRACT This study analyses a particularly auspicious and seemingly thriving kind of democratic innovation in terms of its potential to deal with epistemic and democratic demands to policy-making at the same time. In focus are highly complex, multi-layered arrangements of policy deliberation, consultation and advice that combine an array of input channels and actor groups in a shared quest for a joint, consensual solution to a policy problem. The study asks under which conditions these democratic innovations manage to deal with the double challenge of delivering reliable expertise and providing for substantive participation of all affected viewpoints. Two cases from the German environmental policy context are analyzed in-depth, i.e. the committee on the final storage of nuclear waste and the dialogue on the government’s climate action plan. The comparative case analysis is guided by an assessment framework that builds on input-oriented democratic theory, participatory governance research as well as sociological and epistemological debates of expertise and knowledge in the policy context. Based on the case analyses, the study traces favourable institutional design conditions for striking a balance between the multiple normative demands at play.

Credible Empowerment and Deliberative Participation: A Comparative Study of Two Nuclear Energy Policy Deliberation Cases in Korea

AbstractWhat factors make deliberative participation of public policy effective? Why, in some cases, are participants in deliberation more motivated than others, and reach their final judgment in a timely manner, based on systematic processes of opinion gathering and consensus building? By comparing and investigating two recent cases of public participation in energy policy deliberation in Korea, we argue that deliberative participation is more effective when the prospect that the outcome of their activities might be accepted by decision makers is high. The two cases, the public deliberation committee (PDC) on the nuclear waste issue which operated from 2013 to 2015, and the PDC on the nuclear power plant construction issue which operated in 2017, show that they went through similar courses of action, and used similar methods for deliberation. However, while the 2017 PDC has produced clear‐cut policy recommendations, and the government have accepted these, the 2013 PDC failed to reach conclusions on the given critical issues. We argue that the difference in the results is caused by credible empowerment along with two other factors––the sensitivity of issues and the learning effect. Participants of deliberation tend to judge the possibility of the government’s acceptance of their opinions based on either the government’s direct announcement or its inclusiveness in the past policy history. If governments are willing to consult the public to increase legitimacy and transparency, they should send explicit signals to the public on its inclusiveness in the short term, and also should increase credibility in the long term.

Participatory Infrastructures: The Politics of Mobility Platforms

Much of everyday life in cities is now mediated by digital platforms, a mode of organization in which control is both distributed widely among participants and sharply delimited by the platform’s constraints. This article uses examples of smartphone-based platforms for urban mobility to argue that platforms create new political arrangements of the city, intermediating the social processes of management and movement that characterize urban life. Its empirical basis is a study of user interfaces, data specifications, and algorithms used in the operation and regulation of ride-hailing services and bike-share systems. I focus on three aspects of urban politics affected by platforms: its location, its participants, and the types of conflict it addresses. First, the programming forums in which decisions are encoded in and distributed through platforms’ core digital architecture are new sites of policy deliberation outside the more familiar arenas of city politics. Second, travelers have new opportunities to use platforms for travel on their own terms, but this expanded participation is circumscribed by interfaces that presuppose individual, transactional engagement rather than a participation attentive to a broader social and environmental context. Finally, digital systems show themselves to be well suited to enforcing quantifiable distributional goals, but struggle to resolve the more nuanced relational matters that constitute the politics of everyday city life. These illustrations suggest that digital tools for managing transportation are not only political products, but also reset the stage on which urban encounters play out.

Legislative Design of Director’s Responsibility in India: In Search of Clarity

Abstract Indian Companies Act, 2013 addresses the director’s responsibility through specific statutory provisions. While highlighting certain nuances in the legislative design, the article argues for more clarification for the director’s responsibility, specifically for non-executive and independent directors. The normative contribution of this article stresses the need to reform the existing statutory framework for according protection to directors of a company. Operationalization of fiduciary responsibility based on common law principles, along with section 166, Companies Act, 2013 is not clear in the statutory design. Emerging concerns of the director’s responsibility include lack of adequate protection for non-executive and independent directors which deserve more policy deliberations. The recently introduced Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016 poses evolving responsibility on directors, forming yet another emerging concern in the Indian context.

The Influence of Elite Networks on Green Policy Making

This article analyzes the relationship between the policy networks and the success of renewable energy and emission reduction policies. Arguing that strong connections between typologically different groups of elites are essential for good policies, the analysis looks at the Twitter community structure of the ministers in 34 countries. The results of the network study indicate that the success of renewable energy and CO2 emission reduction policy implementation is strongly related to the community structure in social networks of ministers. Looser network structures within policy communities and an abundance of relatively stronger connections between them are associated with higher renewable energy consumption and also lower CO2 levels, thus possibly with better policies. A case study on seven Nordic and Northern European countries complements and reinforces the theoretical expectations about deliberative policy making.Related ArticlesSabag‐Ben Porat, Chen, Azi Lev‐On, and Sam Lehman‐Wilzig. 2020. “Silent Partners: How Politicians' Facebook Communication with Constituents is Mediated.” Politics & Policy 48 (3): 550‐569. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12352Rowe, Andrew D., and David E. Pitfield. 2019. “The Challenge of Social Media Incorporation: A Case Study of HACAN Clearskies.” Politics & Policy 47 (4): 775‐806. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12319Tanaka, Yugo, Andrew Chapman, Tetsuo Tezuka, and Shigeki Sakurai. 2020. “Multiple Streams and Power Sector Policy Change: Evidence from the Feed‐In Tariff Policy Process in Japan.” Politics & Policy 48 (3): 464‐489. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12357[Correction added on December 17, 2020 after first online publication: The citation “Ben‐Porat, Chen Sabag, Azi Lev‐On, and Sam Lehman‐Wilzig. 2020” was edited to “Sabag‐Ben Porat, Chen, Azi Lev‐On, and Sam Lehman‐Wilzig. 2020“ to reflect correct spelling.]

Challenges and solutions in developing legitimate online participation for EU biodiversity and ecosystem services policies

AbstractTo support legitimate European Union (EU) biodiversity policy development, there is a growing momentum to engage society in these policy processes and build meaningful and inclusive dialogue between science, policy, and society in policy deliberation. So far, engagement efforts have been made to encourage citizen participation in knowledge production via, for example, citizen science. At EU level means to encourage public participation have included a variety of online mechanisms for spreading information and promoting public deliberation. Despite these developments, the involvement of the general public in policy-making at the EU level has been rather inconsistent to date. In this article, we evaluate online science cafés as potential means to encourage dialogue between science, policy, and society; we ask what elements in their design and implementation are essential for inclusive dialogue between science, policy, and society. Our findings emphasise iterative dialogue when approaching multi-scalar challenges. This has important implications for developing legitimate participation across Europe.

The Myth of Global Populism

The “rise of global populism” has become a primary metanarrative for the previous decade in advanced industrial democracies, but I argue that it is a deeply misleading one. Nativism—not populism—is the defining feature of both radical right parties in Western Europe and of radical right politicians like Donald Trump in the United States. The tide of “left-wing populism” in Europe receded quickly, as did its promise of returning power to the people through online voting and policy deliberation. The erosion of democracy in states like Hungary has not been the result of populism, but rather of the deliberate practice of competitive authoritarianism. Calling these disparate phenomena “populist” obscures their core features and mistakenly attaches normatively redeeming qualities to nativists and authoritarians.

Building an Engaged Himalayan Sustainability Science

The Himalayan region is facing a new crisis under climate change, rapid economic transformation, and escalating geopolitical tensions. A large body of Himalayan sciences has endeavored to understand this challenge but has failed to engage meaningfully with the local people and policymakers. I argue for a new engaged Himalayan sustainability science that not only understands and interprets the emerging challenges but also strengthens societal capability.

Making legitimacy: Drug user representation in United Nations drug policy settings

BackgroundThe importance of engaging people who use drugs in drug policy development is increasingly acknowledged including in recent UN documents. Little scholarly attention has been paid to ‘drug user representation’ in the global drug policy setting of the UN such as the Commission on Narcotic Drugs (CND). This paper examines ‘drug user representation’ in key UN drug policy processes over three decades. MethodA mapping process was undertaken using a corpus of publicly available documents from the UNGASS on Drugs and associated CND processes to identify relevant policy processes from 1987 to 2019 (n = 15) which were then assess for presence/absence of ‘drug user representation’. Those processes with positive evidence of ‘drug user representation’ (n = 9) were critically interrogated across three co-constitutive domains of the subjects, objects and forms of ‘drug user representation’. ResultsOur analysis shows that despite calls for greater involvement, dominant UN drug policy discourses and other practices delimit both the political subjectivities available to people who use/have used drugs and their capacity to bring their voices to bear in this context. The analysis also highlights that human rights-based discourses, employed by ‘drug user representatives’, have emerged as an important practice of resistance against the problematic and delimiting power effects of existing UN discourses, governing practices and modes of engagement. ConclusionsIn addition to the practices of resistance being undertaken by ‘drug user representatives’, we suggest there is a need to improve how ‘drug user representation’ is being made possible and done in the sites of UN drug policy deliberation and, that these sites should be opened for questioning. This we argue will not only have a positive impact on political legitimacy for ‘drug user representation’, but on the health and human rights of people who use/have used drugs.

The IASB and Comparability of International Financial Reporting: Research Evidence and Implications

AbstractOne motivation for the adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) is to improve the comparability of financial information presented by listed companies and thereby to contribute to improving transparency, accountability and efficiency in financial markets around the world. Beginning from the perspective of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) and academic researchers, I describe what is meant by comparability and then I list four areas of research where academics have investigated comparability of IFRS financial statements. Within each area I present examples of studies, usually around the time of adoption of IFRS, and discuss the implications of the research findings for the work of the IASB and the activities of other bodies supporting the implementation of IFRS. Finally, I identify areas of future research that could contribute to public policy deliberations.

Policy Deliberation and Voter Persuasion: Experimental Evidence from an Election in the Philippines

AbstractIn a randomized experiment in cooperation with two national parties competing in a congressional election in the Philippines, we estimate the causal effect on voting behavior of a town‐hall style campaign in which candidates discuss their campaign platform with small groups of citizens. Keeping the parties' platform fixed, we find that town‐hall meetings have a positive effect on parties' vote shares compared to the status quo, in which voters play a passive role. Consistent with the parties' advocacy for underprivileged groups, we observe heterogeneous effects by income, education, and gender. Deliberative campaigns increase voters' awareness on the issues parties campaign on, affecting the vote of the direct beneficiaries of the parties' platform.

Tensões e conflitos na vigilância digital de pessoas para controle da pandemia de COVID-19

Neste artigo queremos discutir as tensões e os conflitos na construção de Smart Cities no Brasil, particularmente em relação a geolocalização de pessoas para controle da pandemia de COVID-19. Em primeiro lugar, cabe discutir o conceito de Smart Cities, particularmente sua origem e evolução. As cidades inteligentes estão vinculadas ao uso generalizado de tecnologias digitais, especialmente as tecnologias de informação e comunicação. Destaca-se a possibilidade de vigilância sobre indivíduos através de procedimentos digitais de geolocalização. Questiona-se tanto a abordagem de que as tecnologias - como forças produtivas - são neutras, quanto aquelas que as consideram essencialmente perversas. Há um destaque para a crítica humanística da tecnologia, que subordina o uso das tecnologias aos interesses e a dignidade humana. Por fim, é investigado o caso de conflito em torno da geolocalização das pessoas nas cidades para vigilância e controle da pandemia de COVID-19. Este caso atualiza a tensão entre interesses comunitários e liberdades individuais na esfera pública. Indica-se a política deliberativa como modo de composição entre a liberdade e os interesses comunitários, bem como para acordar diretrizes e métodos para a construção de Smart Cities.