A Multiple Streams Analysis of Institutional Innovation in Forest Watershed Governance

Increasingly severe wildfires have focused attention on forested watershed vulnerabilities, causing significant changes to policies and governance. We utilized the Multiple Streams Approach (MSA) to understand institutional innovations of federal agency–large water provider partnerships in Colorado to protect watersheds through joint planning and funding. Ambiguous problem definition and focusing events were significant aspects of these partnerships. We interviewed individuals in the partnerships, with MSA ideas of how solutions to policy problems develop, and the role of policy entrepreneurs. We found that wildfires served as focusing events, creating space and time for learning, collaboration and new problem framing, increased political attention, and institutional innovation. In this study, windows of opportunity stayed open longer, policy entrepreneurs and agencies played larger roles in communication and coupling streams and the context of fast‐moving, unpredictable ecological crises changed responses to issues. Our findings also have implications for broader policy studies and environmental governance scholarship.     

Tax Competition and Tax Coordination in a Median Voter Model

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of capital tax coordination in a simple model of fiscal competition where fiscal policy is subject to majority voting and households differ with respect to their labor and capital income. It turns out that a coordinated capital tax increase may raise or reduce welfare, depending on the relative magnitude of i) economic distortions induced by a labor tax and ii) political distortions resulting from the influence of the median voter on fiscal policy decisions. A negative welfare effect is more likely, the smaller the marginal excess burden of the labor tax and the smaller the ratio of the median voter's labor income to average labor income. We also use empirical estimates of the marginal excess burden of taxation to determine the welfare effects of tax coordination; it turns out that a negative welfare effect of coordinated tax increases may emerge in our model for empirically reasonable parameters.     

Perceptions and practices of farmer empowerment in Tanzania

The purpose of this article is to review the implementation of various empowerment interventions in Tanzania. Data for the review are based on field visits to programmes/projects/organisations involved in implementing empowerment interventions in various regions of the country. These visits involved key-informant interviews, sample surveys, and focus-group discussions with farmers. The review highlights the perceptions of empowerment at the levels of project staff and practitioners/beneficiaries, as well as the approaches used by various organisations and projects in implementing empowerment activities. In addition the article discusses the factors perceived to lead to empowerment, as well as its consequences.     

Social Work and the Security Issue in the Netherlands and Belgium

Over the past years security has become a central issue in political discussions both in the Netherlands and Belgium. This has led to the setting of new governmental schemes in urban areas that rely upon the commitment of social workers to a large extent. Besides that, a number of new professions linked to social intervention have appeared. The purpose of this article is to analyse the emergence of security as an issue and the effects of the new governmental schemes in the field of social work, and to compare the political and social backgrounds, how security is dealt with and the effects on social work in Belgium and the Netherlands. The general assumption is that the practice of social professions tends to a new balance between change and control, the two usual poles of social work, at the expense of emancipatory practices towards marginalised people. In other words, it is wondered whether the action of social workers is to put in place a system of control and risk prevention as a mix of social work and people policing. The article shows that the development in this direction in the two countries is similar, in spite of significant background differences.     

Risk and the limits of governance: Exploring varied patterns of risk‐based governance across Europe

Risk‐based approaches to governance are widely promoted as universally applicable foundations for improving the quality, efficiency, and rationality of governance across policy domains. Premised on the idea that governance cannot eliminate all adverse outcomes, these approaches provide a method for establishing priorities and allocating scarce resources, and, in so doing, rationalise the limits of what governance interventions can, and should, achieve. Yet cursory observation suggests that risk‐based approaches have spread unevenly across countries. Based on a comparison of the UK, France, and Germany, this article explores the ways in which, and why, such approaches have “colonised” governance regimes in the UK, but have had much more limited application in France and Germany. We argue that the institutionally patterned adoption of risk‐based governance across these three countries is related to how entrenched governance norms and accountability structures within their national polities handle both the identification and acceptance of adverse governance outcomes.     

Beyond “Socially Constructed” Disasters: Re-politicizing the Debate on Large Dams through a Political Ecology of Risk

Questions of dam safety and hazard potential most often do not take center-stage in contestations and articulations concerning large dams. Through a comparative study of two of Europe’s most emblematic dam disasters – Vajont (Italy) and Ribadelago (Spain) – and the ongoing conflict over the safety of the Lower Subansiri Hydroelectric Project in Northeast India, this article argues that the damage caused by dam disasters is often not unavoidable or unforeseen but instead allowed to happen. Our cases show that power relations, economic pressures and profit influence “risky” dam management decisions, often disregarding the vernacular knowledge of concerned communities and silencing critical voices that do not fit dominant narratives of modernization and progress. We posit that an essential requirement for re-politicizing the question of dam safety is to unpack the apolitical notion of “socially constructed disasters,” thinking instead about “capital-driven destructions.” By emphasizing resistance against dam projects and against dominant risk discourses across space and time, this article seeks to underline the legitimacy of past and ongoing struggles surrounding the construction of large dams.     

Regulating mobile advertising in the European Union and the United States

Mobile advertising is a gradually developing component of the marketing mix that includes advertisements directed to or accessed on consumers' mobile devices. Growing concerns about the protection of the consumers' personal data are being raised since mobile advertising may become an extremely intrusive practice in an intimate personal space. Approaches of protecting the consumers' personal information differ greatly throughout the world. This article contrasts the regulatory environment in the European Union and in the United States applicable to the consumer's privacy and personal data used for mobile advertising purposes while also examining the effectiveness of each of these approaches.