Entrepreneurial Regulatory Legal Strategy: The Case of Cannabis

This article develops the concepts of regulatory legal strategy, a resource-based view of government agencies, and regulatory entrepreneurship. These ideas are explored through a case study of the limited (if any) access that legal cannabis-related businesses have to the banking system due to the clash between federal law and laws in those states that have legalized some uses of cannabis. This article argues that regulators’ entrepreneurial regulatory legal strategies can have a material impact on regulated entities and give them a competitive advantage. To demonstrate, this article claims that regulators’ adoption of permissive regulatory legal strategies has facilitated access of some cannabis-related businesses to the banking system. Conversely, if regulators adopted obstructive regulatory strategies, this would act as a constraint on such access in the future, even if Congress resolves the federalism issue largely responsible for the current limitations these businesses face.     

Power,REDD+ and reforming forest governance in Indonesia

Abstract

This paper analyses the various power relations that shape forest policy and governance reform in Indonesia. It applies Foucault’s theories on power to several key initiatives introduced as part of REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation). By analysing both the operation and the effects of power relations the paper accounts for how competing actors influence major policy change, and the impact different policies have on governing multiple forest users. Sovereign and disciplinary power underpins government attempts to implement new regulatory, planning and enforcement functions across the forest estate. Policy instruments such as the concession moratorium create securitised territorial zones that enable sustainable forest practices to operate. By contrast, forest management units operate through inclusive strategies that discipline forest users into responsible managers, whilst enforcement excludes those who contravene the law. Productive power and resistance explain efforts by government and non-government actors to progress or limit REDD+. Productive power operates through the multiple activities that generate new knowledge on incentivising carbon, and by engaging new subjects in carbon projects. Community resistance draws on discourses and localised subjectivities focussed on forest dependency and rights, whereas industry networks have been adept at positioning REDD+ as a threat to national development.     

Timing is everything: a quantitative study of presidentialist regime dynamics in Eurasia, 1992–2016

Why do some countries with presidentialist constitutions feature more political closure than others at a given time? A quantitative study of post-Soviet countries since independence finds that much of the observed variation in political closure reflects timing, or the particular point at which a country happens to be within a regime cycle, rather than structural or other factors usually cited to explain regime change. Specifically, how much time a president has had to coordinate rivalrous networks around his or her authority is at least as strong a predictor of the level of regime closure as are economic development, economic growth, resource rents, proximity to Europe, and key cultural factors, even when controlling for the level of closure in the preceding year. This pattern is not found among countries with divided-executive constitutions, indicating it is related to the constitution rather than a general phenomenon.     

Reflections on Leadership: Jean‐Jacques Dordain of the European Space Agency

In 2015, Jean‐Jacques Dordain retired as director general of the European Space Agency (ESA). This is Europe's NASA and includes a host of sovereign nations that differ in language, culture, economics, and politics. As ESA’s director general, Dordain pulled together a disparate and often quarreling group of countries and got them moving in the same direction. Billions of dollars were involved in a sequence of large‐scale, complex spaceflights. Successes far surpassed failures. Dordain stated that if there is one area of administration about which ESA could teach the world, it is “that of international cooperation. Very simple—it's because ESA is an institutional cooperation venture.” In this Administrative Profile, Dordain comments on the issues he faced in guiding European cooperation as well as relations with the United States and other countries.     

Explaining the Crisis of the European Migration and Asylum Regime

Since 2013, the European migration and asylum regime has entered a phase of crisis, which reveals the deep interdependencies between its different components (including intra-EU mobility) and the unbalanced nature of its normative foundations. This original structural fragility had not fundamentally compromised the overall functioning of the regime until two major exogenous factors (the economic crisis, with its asymmetrical impact on the eurozone, and the wave of political instability and conflicts on the southern shore of the Mediterranean) brought its intrinsic limits to the point of rupture. The ongoing, highly contentious process of reform of the European migration and asylum regime is an unprecedented and crucially important test of the capacity of one the European Union’s key sectors to evolve under pressure and to adapt to a rapidly and deeply changing geopolitical, economic and demographic environment.     

Presidential address— Seeing through the fog

All public policies have two things in common. They deal with the future and, as a result, they are based on forecasts or projections. The forecasts or projections may be implicit or based on naive extrapolation or ad hoc assumptions. They may be explicit and based on elaborate extrapolations or on behavioral models. In either case, unfortunately, they are notoriously unreliable. In fact, they almost always are wrong—sometimes just a bit wrong, but often massively wrong. Nonetheless, forecasts are what distinguishes reasoned planning from blind action. Without forecasts, we would be totally at sea. That we have to use forecasts or projections, that we know they will be wrong, and that they usually are wrong raise some difficult questions for policy analysis and policymaking. Regrettably, in my view, they receive too little attention.2 My purpose today is to urge that they receive more. My comments are intended to make four points. First, it is important for policymakers to appreciate how errorprone forecasts and projections actually are. Second, it is important not to permit the availability of projections or forecasts to obscure fundamental policy questions that are important in any plausible scenario. Third, uncertainty means that, where possible, it is prudent to design policies with builtin flexibility that respond automatically to diverse possible outcomes. Fourth, where builtin flexibility is impossible, complete analyses should take into account the consequences if forecasts prove wrong, and weigh those consequences against the results of postponing action until information improves or against other policies under the plausible range of possible outcomes. © 2000 by the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management.     

Party Government and the "Cohesive Power of Public Plunder"

We argue that party government in the U.S. House of Representatives rests on two pillars: the pursuit of policy goals and the disbursement of particularistic benefits. Existing theories of party government argue that the majority party in the House is often successful in biasing policy outcomes in its favor. In the process, it creates "policy losers" among its own members who nevertheless support their party on procedural votes. We posit that the majority party creates an incentive for even the policy losers to support a procedural coalition through judicious distribution of particularistic benefits that compensates policy losers at a rate commensurate with the policy losses that they suffer. We evaluate our theory empirically using the concept of "roll rates" in conjunction with federal domestic outlays data for the period 1983–96. We find that, within the majority party, policy losers are favored in the distribution of "pork barrel" spending throughout this period.     

The Social Construction of the Market

Although Berger and Luckmann do not specifically discuss the market, they would undoubtedly agree that the market is socially constructed. Indeed, the market is a product of social action that has an objective and subjective reality. Inspired by Berger and Luckmann’s work, this paper will describe the social construction of the market. Specifically, it will focus on the Austrian understanding of the market. It is my contention that the Austrians have articulated a “sociology of the market” that is consistent with Berger and Luckmann’s approach.     

Incomplete Clearinghouse Mandates

In the 2007–08 financial crisis, over‐the‐counter (OTC) derivatives triggered the collapse of colossal financial institutions. In response, global policy makers instituted clearinghouse mandates. As a result, all standardized OTC derivatives must now use clearinghouses, and global financial market stability now depends upon these institutions. Yet certain underlying legal and regulatory structures threaten to undermine clearinghouse stability, particularly were a significant clearinghouse to become distressed. This article argues that the clearinghouse mandates are incomplete in that they fail to reform these problematic arrangements. As with electric utilities, the lights at the financial market infrastructures known as clearinghouses must always be on. Yet the legal frameworks for handling a distressed clearinghouse, the problem of clearinghouse recovery, and resolution, remain uncertain. This article advances debate on this issue. It argues that recovery, a private market restructuring process, can be conceptualized as a bargaining game dependent upon time‐critical cooperation between a clearinghouse and members. This article uses transaction cost economics to demonstrate, however, that certain underlying legal and regulatory structures could work at cross‐purposes to this necessary cooperation, and actually increase its cost. Based upon this analysis, it proposes reforms designed to ensure that parties’ incentives promote efficient recovery. In the absence of efficient recovery frameworks, the path of a distressed, significant clearinghouse is likely to resemble that of the government‐backed mortgage lenders whose fate more than ten years after their entry into conservatorship remains uncertain. This article aims to help avoid a repeat of this history.