Technocratic Research Articles

Biomedical technocracy, the networked public sphere and the biopolitics of COVID-19: notes on the Agamben affair

ABSTRACT Giorgio Agamben’s public interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic against emergency measures like lockdowns, obligatory vaccinations and the prescribed use of masks have been highly controversial. I argue that Agamben’s essays must be read as a modern prophecy of doom warning for the dangers of biomedical technocracy. Agamben marshals the sound of Old Testament prophets to shock his readers into critically rethinking their complacency with governmental norms. This warning is appropriate yet ill-phrased: Agamben presumes the dominant obstacle to genuine debate in the public sphere is a standardisation of discourse under the power of monopoly capital, whereas the opposite problem of too many divergent voices is more salient for today’s digitally networked public sphere. Furthermore, Agamben depicts a too strong contrast between scientifically informed technocratic government and democratic freedom, which leaves him blind for the democratic potential of the sciences themselves. I employ Ulrich Beck’s theory of the risk society and social movements to introduce more nuance into Agamben’s apocalyptic prophecy.

Nexus between flooding impacts and coping strategies in Nairobi’s settlements

Nairobi's settlements are vulnerable to urban flooding exacerbated by anthropogenic factors. Households living in flood-prone areas suffer perennially. However, little scientific evidence exists on the relationship between impacts of flooding and coping strategies in Nairobi's settlements. In this study, primary data was obtained through ground-truth surveys and administration of questionnaires to 310 households in Nairobi's crowded informal settlements of Mathare Kosovo and Kibera Mashimoni. Information captured included their bio-data, knowledge and perception of flooding, socio-economic, susceptibility and recovery indicators. Secondary data was mainly from literature review. The findings of the canonical correlation revealed that an insignificant relationship of 0.2964 and 0.2503 existed between flooding impacts and coping strategies adopted by households and communities respectively. Floods caused inaccessibility of houses, workplaces and schools, damages to settlements infrastructure, drowning, diseases and displacement of residents. The indirect impacts were loss of livelihoods, environmental degradation, loss of manhours in traffic jams and economic loss. This study is novel in that it provides empirical scientific evidence on the nexus between impacts of flooding and coping strategies in an urban settlement. It augments existing literature on flood risks in urban settlements. It also provides an entry point for policy and decision makers such as scientists, private sector leaders, urban planners and government technocrats to make informed policy guidelines and intervention strategies.

Governmental predominance in Italian law-making: undemocratic or illiberal?

ABSTRACT Italy has experienced different kinds of involution of parliamentary democracy and the legislative output over the course of the past couple of decades. Following the ‘Berlusconi-era’ (1994–2011) two major issues have dominated the evolution of Italian politics: technocratic governments (predominantly that of Monti in 2011–2013) and the recent emergence of populist parties (e.g. the Five Star Movement, the League). Despite the apparent opposition of these phenomena, they do share many commonalities with regard to their approaches to the legislative process. They both fostered an acceleration of established in Italian law-making, which also become more apparent in the last decade. The constraints provided for by the 1948 Constitution (including the Head of State and the independent and powerful Constitutional Court) had so far limited impact on these problematic trends.

Who wants technocrats? A comparative study of citizen attitudes in nine young and consolidated democracies

Technocratic cabinets and expert, non-political ministers appointed in otherwise partisan cabinets have become a common reality in recent decades in young and older democracies, but we know little about how citizens see this change and what values, perceptions and experiences drive their attitudes towards technocratic government. The article explores the latter topic by drawing on recent comparative survey data from nine countries, both young and consolidated democracies from Europe and Latin America. Two individual-level characteristics trigger particularly strong support for the replacement of politicians with experts: low political efficacy and authoritarian values. They are complemented by a third, somewhat weaker factor: corruption perception. At the macro level, technocracy appeals to citizens of countries where the quality of democracy is deficient and where technocratic cabinets are a part of historical legacy. Surprisingly, civic activism and, partially, satisfaction with democracy enhance technocratic orientation, indicating such attitudes are not expressions of alienation or depoliticisation.

Architecture between heteronomy and self-generation

Architecture between heteronomy and self-generation

Italy, the Monti government and the euro crisis (2011-12)

Hailed initially as the country’s saviour for saving Italy from default, Mario Monti’s technocratic government (2011-13) ended in controversy and with its achievements questioned. Aware of this contested legacy, this article seeks to revisit Monti’s term in office and to assess his approach to the crisis that engulfed Italy and the eurozone in 2011-12. In doing so, it looks primarily at Monti’s European policy, but also briefly examines his domestic agenda. Monti’s legacy has so far drawn very limited academic interest. By filling a gap in the existing literature on contemporary European and Italian affairs, this article aims to improve our understanding of a critical phase in the recent politics and foreign policy of one the key EU member states.

Politicizing Regulation: Administrative Law, Technocratic Government, and Republican Political Theory

This article explores the relationship between modern populist movements in America and administrative law by analyzing how features of current administrative law contribute to populist or anti-establishment political movements. The article argues that features of administrative law, like notice and comment and “hard look” review, have been interpreted through the lens of a liberal rationalist political theory that is skeptical of democratic control of regulatory policy, and thereby excludes the general public from participation in the creation of politically salient national regulations. The commitment to this rationalist theory of government manifests itself in the politically neutral technocratic justifications that agencies employ and that the judiciary expects. The result is that administrative law is pessimistic about ordinary citizens’ ability to contribute to regulatory policy; that pessimism provides fodder for populist politics by contributing to the public’s feelings of distrust of and estrangement from the federal government. Recent administrative law scholarship has paid scant attention to administrative law’s relationship to anti-establishment political movements, even when those movements take aim at the administrative state directly. To remedy this problem, the article argues, based on republican political theory, for greater public contribution to regulatory policy as a way for citizens to regain a sense of connection to and trust in each other and their government through sustained participation in politics.

Canada’s economic assistance to the OPT: ideology, politics, and flawed responses

ABSTRACT While Canada has been providing development assistance to the Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) since 1993, its economic development assistance program took shape in 2007 after the formation of the Palestinian technocratic government. Even though the Canadian government had access to substantial analysis regarding the most significant impediments to the economic development of the OPT, its chosen areas of focus were informed more by its ideology, politics towards the region, and a belief in maintaining a viable economy until such time that efforts to work out the political issues related to illegal settlements, access and movement, borders, and the final formation of a Palestinian state bear fruit. As demonstrated, Canada’s actions, along with that of other donors, have allowed for Israel to continue undertaking actions that have a significant economic cost for Palestinians and that make adequate economic development impossible and a long-term viable Palestinian economy less likely.

Experts in Government: What for? Ambiguities in Public Opinion Towards Technocracy

Technocratic governments and similar systems that give more voice to experts in the decision-making process are one of the potential alternatives to traditional representative party government. These alternatives have become increasingly popular, especially in countries where strong political disaffection and previous favourable pro-expert attitudes exist simultaneously. The Spanish case is one of these settings, with the emergence of a political party, Ciudadanos (Citizens), that represents these ideas. This article contributes to the understanding of public opinion support for an expert government, its main motives, and social supports. We claim that experts are not so much a decision-making alternative as they are a desired piece of the decision-making process. Support for a more significant role for experts comes especially from those that credit them with ample technical capacities, but most citizens want them to work as a piece of representative government, not as an alternative to it. The article combines two types of evidence: A survey of a representative sample of the population, including innovative questions about support to expert governments, and 10 focus groups that allow a more in-depth comprehension of the support (and criticism) of an increased role for experts. The results provide a nuanced picture of the types of expert involvement sought and their respective social support.

Offline: The coming technocracy

Offline: The coming technocracy

Neo-trasformismo: Historical legacies and populist revolt

There have been three main types of political outcome from the Great Recession. The first is an insurgency from the left exemplified by Podemos, now in decline, in Spain. It demands a return to classic European social democracy, but presents itself in a more radical rhetorical garb than its mid twentieth century forbears. The second is an insurgency from the right, best exemplified by Hungary’s Victor Orbán and his Fidesz Party. It demands a return to a national capitalism reminiscent of the 1930s. The third is the uniquely Italian phenomenon of the Five Star Movement-Lega combination combined with the rise of technocratic governments called into existence by an increasingly activist presidency. What explains this third, mixed model?

Architectures of asylum: Making home in a state of permanent temporariness

Urban research in Germany has started to address the socio-spatial distribution and architectures of so-called collective accommodation for asylum seekers, refugee camps, and new forms of ethnic segregation triggered by refugee movements in recent years. The spatial practices of refugees themselves within these processes have not yet been a subject of substantive research. Combining research methods from social and architectural sciences, this article investigates the physical, material, social and symbolic appropriation processes and the spatial dimension of homemaking by Syrian refugees currently housed in refugee accommodation in Berlin, Germany. What spatial knowledge is mobilized at the place of asylum in order to turn the accommodation into a home? How do spatial practices and knowledge hybridize practices of the place of origin, experiences made during the flight and the arriving and uncertain period of stay at an unfamiliar place of asylum? How do spatial appropriation processes collide with humanitarian logics and technocratic emergency management approaches at the place of asylum? With these questions, the article focuses on the ways in which refugees perceive, adapt to, appropriate and alter their new urban environment physically and socially, and how they thereby draw on existing and evolving stocks of urban knowledge, urban experiences and social relationships. It argues that to develop a homelike space in temporary accommodation, arriving refugees mobilize knowledge at the place of asylum which can only be understood as a re-figuration process that is equally at work in the case of other migrants, migration and translocal processes. Studying these urban re-figurations thus helps us to reveal how the interplay of refugees’ agency and their knowledge and the technocratic regime – as a state of permanent temporariness – affects the making of a ‘home’.

Alternativa, nebo doplněk stranické demokracie? Podpora technokratickému vládnutí v České republice

The article deals with support of technocracy as an alternative system of the governance in the Czech Republic. In this article, technocracy is perceived as opposed to party democracy. The article contributes to the debate on the decline of party democracy and its possible replacement with another type of government. Based on the data from the European Values Study and using binomial logistic regression, the article explains the technocratic attitudes among the Czech citizens. On the contrary to the existing literature, technocratic government does not seem to be perceived as a substitute to party government but rather as a supplement to it.

Global HIV Interventions and Technocratic Racism in a West Papuan NGO

ABSTRACT In the era of scale up, global donor-driven HIV activities are transforming NGO work by demanding administrative, technical, and data-oriented activities. Drawing on interviews and participant observation in an NGO in the West Papuan city of Manokwari between 2011 and 2014, I attempt to understand why Indigenous Papuan NGO employees were steadily replaced by non-Indigenous migrant settlers, mainly of Javanese heritage, to deliver HIV services. I show that new rivalries, technical roles, performance targets and efficiency rhetoric intersected with existing racialization to produce a preference for Javanese employees, who were assumed to be more compliant and professional than their Papuan counterparts and to operate more easily within the technocratic regime imposed by donor expectations. I use the term technocratic racism to describe the way that global HIV rationalities intersect with ethnic stereotypes and gendered racial ideas to make possible certain HIV workers and not others. I contribute to anthropological literature on the delivery of HIV services by showing how a technocratic approach to HIV/AIDS intervention intersects with a settler-colonial context to gradually exclude Indigenous employees. Approaches that allow for relational, independent and flexible services would assist to decolonize HIV responses in West Papua.

ANALYSIS OF M-P-F-A-A-C (Meaning – Positioning – Functioning – Authorizing – Actuating - Controlling) ON THE VILLAGE GOVERNMENT INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENT (Law Making Philosophically of Law Number 6 of 2014 On Villages)

<em>The issue of the article is "What are the implications of village institutional governance for village governance institutional governance?". The legis ratio of Law Number 6 of 2014 states in Article 18 B paragraph (2) of the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia, while the subject matters prescribed includes two main material types of different villages. This study uses a normative legal research method with a prescriptive conceptual approach and statute approach. The theoretical basis used is the rule of law, the theory of legislation, the concept of local government,;the concept of authority, and the concept of M-P-F-A-A-C. The results showed that the village government regulated by Law Number 6 of 2014 is not an autonomous village but an independent village, not a customary law community unit and not a formal government. While the implications for governance in the Meaning aspect, happened to shift in the meaning of village government institutions from time to time; in the Positioning, the institutional status of village government as state-corporatism is a deviation in the administrative logic of local government; in the Functioning, the imposition of technocratic local government institutional function work is unrealistic to the institutional function of a self-governing community; in the Authorizing, authority over the principle of Recognition and Subsidiarity that is apparent from the government is outside the principle of decentralization; in the Actuating, the work apparatus of the village is not solid yet, showing poor regulation which also technocratic in Government Regulation Number 43 of 2014 Jo. Government Regulation Number 47 of 2015; in the Controlling, construction of checks & balances carried out by Village Council (BPD) are still ineffective due to weak apparatus competence and low community participation in the policy making process. In conclusion, Law Number 6 of 2014 has a 'contra-productive' implication for village governance institutional governance, therefore Law Number 6 of 2014 needs to be reformulated</em>

Technocracy, Trust and Democracy: Evidence on Citizens’ Attitudes from a Natural Experiment in Italy

AbstractDuring the eurozone crisis, technocratic governments were appointed in several eurozone countries, becoming in the eyes of many the embodiment of the EU's democratic deficit. In spite of the central place that these technocratic governments occupy in the scholarly debate, however, we have remarkably little evidence on Europeans’ attitudes towards technocracy, and technocratic governments are under-studied from an empirical standpoint. We contribute to the very limited empirical literature on this topic by using a novel natural experiment design, in the context of the 2011 Italian crisis that led to the appointment of the Monti technocratic cabinet. We hypothesize that the effect of technocratic appointments on citizens’ satisfaction with democracy is a priori uncertain, and it depends on the balance of a trade-off between reduced input participation and increased output effectiveness. Overall, the results point to citizens’ attitudes towards technocracy being more complex than often assumed in the debate.

Models of supranational policymaking and the reform of the EMU

Under what conditions do sovereign governments agree to create a common policy institution? And what model of supranational policymaking may be preferable? To answer these questions, we introduce a policy game of two interdependent countries with reciprocal negative externalities created by shocks to a socially relevant variable. Depending on national preferences over policy options and their outcomes, both countries incur welfare losses if governments pursue non-cooperative policy choices. Then we examine what kind of supranational policy regimes may be endorsed by both governments according to the Pareto criterion. Two regimes are “technocratic” (they do not take national preferences into account), two are “political” (they do). One political regime that we call “union” aggregates the national preferences additively. The thrust of our analysis is that the technocratic regimes are dominated by non-cooperation, so that the single alternative is between the union and non-cooperation. Yet an important point is that the union is the Pareto-dominant regime only within a limited range of asymmetry between countries’ preferences. This result has notable implications for the debate on the reform of the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) facing the challenge of further integration of member countries. Application to the EMU case is assisted by numerical simulations based on empirical parameters drawn from qualified external sources, which show that aymmetries in national attitudes towards policies that “Europe wants” may jeopardize the creation of a union in alternative to non-cooperation.

Los límites de la tecnocracia: el Patronato Nacional de Asistencia Psiquiátrica y la modernización autoritaria de la asistencia psiquiátrica en la España del segundo franquismo

A partir de la década de 1950, los viejos planteamientos de la higiene mental, dirigidos esencialmente a la profilaxis de la locura en el marco de una serie de políticas intervencionistas de defensa social, fueron dando paso a un proyecto mucho más ambicioso y comprensivo que aspiraba a promover el equilibrio emocional y el desempeño psicosocial de los individuos en el contexto de unas retóricas de la salud y unas redes de atención crecientemente socializadas. En la España del segundo franquismo, el nuevo ideario inspiró y orientó las actividades del Patronato Nacional de Asistencia Psiquiátrica (PANAP), que puso en marcha un modesto programa de educación para la salud mental y auspició diversas iniciativas de modernización y reforma asistencial. El presente artículo analiza estas actividades en el marco del despliegue de la gubernamentalidad autoritaria y tecnocrática por parte del segundo franquismo y examina su inanidad a la vista de la incompatibilidad esencial de dichas estrategias de gobierno con la nueva cultura de la salud mental.

Technocracy: Hopes and Risks

Рассматриваются положения современных концепций технократии с учетом той роли, которую технократы играют в обществе и, прежде всего, в сфере управления. Раскрывая специфические признаки технократии как составной части правящей группы, автор показывает высокие потенциальные возможности технократов в силу имеющихся у них специальных знаний и организаторских способностей. Дан анализ распрост раненных в научной литературе утверждений о рисках, сопряженных с деятельностью технократов. Главным из них считается ограничение или отрицание демократии при господстве технократии. В отличие от утверждающих о несовместимости технократии, основанной на приоритете профессионализма в управлении, и демократии как народовластия, автором обосновывается идея о несовместимости технократии не с демократией вообще, а скорее с прямой демократией. В принципе технократическая власть возможна при сохранении основных институтов и принципов представительной демократии, но при определенном ограничении массового политического участия как способе решения проблем, требующих специальных познаний. Предлагаются варианты сочетания профессионализма в управлении с демократическим участием общественности. Особое внимание уделено одному из коренных положений концепции технократии – об аполитичности технократов и их отстраненности от идеологических соображений, а также об отсутствии у этой группы интереса к социальной политике. Автором отрицается существование непреодолимого барьера между технократами и политиками, обосновывается зависимость технократов от политической и идеологической среды.

Domestic Workers of the World Unite! A Global Movement for Dignity and Human Rights by Jennifer N. Fish

Domestic Workers of the World Unite! A Global Movement for Dignity and Human Rights by Jennifer N. Fish