Relationships,learning, and trust: lessons from the SNV–RECOFTC partnership

The term ‘partnership’ has become a watch-word for development organisations that aim to mobilise the resources and collaboration needed to achieve long-term goals such as poverty reduction and sustainable resource management. Achieving effective collaboration in practice, however, can be challenging. This article adds to recent discussions on what makes effective partnerships, offering lessons from an on-going partnership between RECOFTC (Regional Community Forestry Training Center for Asia and the Pacific) and SNV (Netherlands Development Organisation). Key findings include the observation that the role of individuals in maintaining partnerships often goes unrecognised and needs to be supported in appropriate ways; clearly defined and focused areas of collaboration are essential; a formal basis for the partnership needs to be backed with strong informal communication and collaboration processes; and, while partners bring distinctive knowledge and networks to a partnership, some degree of evenness in the scale and type of resources committed to the partnership is important.     

Understanding Impact in Policy Advisory Systems: The Australian Case of the “Thinker in Residence”

The dynamics of policy advice giving in a policy advisory system (PAS) is complex, multifaceted, and relational. Research on policy advice has shifted from a “first wave” to a “second wave” that places a greater focus on the dynamics of PASs. This article expands our understanding of the impact of advice giving in a PAS by developing a framework that integrates supply, demand, content, and contextual factors. This article introduces a new type of policy actor (the “thinker in residence”) to better understand the relational dynamics of a PAS and compare why some actors achieve greater impact than others.     

Decentering America: the Quest for a Transnational American Studies

The planned removal of a Civil War monument in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the pretext for a white supremacist rally there in August 2017. It brought American fascists back into the streets, marching under the banner of a virulent nativism, of a vicious fear of being removed from the pedestal of their proper place in society. It also brought to the minds of people watching these images on TV older visual repertoires dating back to Nazi-Germany, fascist Italy, and similar racist clashes elsewhere. In such a stream of consciousness, such a chain of visual recollections, national settings—American or otherwise—are transcended. The wandering—and wondering—mind of the observer moves in a space naturally trans-national. The following essay considers the implications of such mental processes for the established forms of discourse among historians.     

Transnational organised cyber crime: distinguishing threat from reality

Cybercrime has become an integral part of the transnational threat landscape and conjures up pressing images of nefarious and increasingly complex online activity. More recently, the concept of ‘organised crime’ has been attributed to cybercriminality. There has been subsequent disagreement and confusion concerning whether such crime is a derivation of traditional organised crime or an evolution of such crime within the online space. This opaque state of affairs has been exacerbated by the relative lack of clear evidence attesting to and supporting either scenario. Technological advances have always been used to the advantage of the criminal fraternity. The crucial question that remains is whether those advances have merely facilitated the commission of physical crime or whether in fact they have led to the creation of a new wave of traditional, but virtual, organised crime.