Competence Trust,Reflexivity and Risk Management in Hong Kong

Abstract

Trust is an essential element of governance. Lack of trust in government engenders doubts regarding its competence, weakens its legitimacy, and creates difficulties in the process of governing. As suggested, declining trust was related to reflexivity. This article, based on a Hong Kong study, confirms that a lack of competence trust in the government's ability to manage work-related risks correlated with reflexivity. Self-identified social status also influences the degree of reflexivity and competence trust. The conventional approach to cultivating trust through managed social participation has been widely practiced, but the results have not led to an increase in competence trust in Hong Kong, even when the policy outcomes are positive. While recognizing that reflexivity and its impacts on trust are inevitable, this article argues that efforts should be made to develop critical trust through meaningful participation in the deliberative process.     

The power of partnerships in global governance

Development partnerships are frequently represented as a way of giving recipient countries ‘ownership’ of their development programmes, whereas critics argue that partnerships are little more than conditionality by another name. Drawing on analyses of governmentality in modern liberal societies, this article advances an alternative understanding and argues that development partnerships can be regarded as a form of advanced liberal rule that increasingly govern through the explicit commitment to the self‐government and agency of recipient states. Focusing in particular on the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) and Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs), it argues that as a form of advanced liberal power, partnerships work not primarily as direct domination and imposition, but through promises of incorporation and inclusion. They derive their power through simultaneously excluding and incorporating, and by using freedom as a formula of rule partnerships help produce modern, self‐disciplined citizens and states by enlisting them as responsible agents in their own development.     

The Developer's Self: a non-deterministic Foucauldian frame

Recent development studies literature has begun to consider the developer's self. This welcome enlargement of the field deserves to be deepened and extended by moving beyond opposition to post-development critics, and by articulating an explicit theoretical frame for examining developers' selves. By exploring Foucault's suggestion that modern approaches to knowledge and selfhood may be entwined through developmentalism, this paper proposes a flexible and non-deterministic cultural–historical framework for considering developers' selves. Foucault's analyses of relations of power and subjectivity provide strategies for examining developers' selves, but this does not suggest that such selves can be read off the proposed framework. Examining developers' selves is necessarily a reflective ethical task, and one which requires engaging the external relations that constitute the self. Foucault provides valuable resources for this task, but there is also a need to extend upon and complement a Foucauldian approach. Pursuing our new-found interest in developers' selves by working through and beyond Foucault promises to open new professional futures and possibilities for development practice.     

Anthropo-Technology

Information in our era of networks and genome maps, according to Sloterdijk, binds man and his tools that transform nature into one operative system. This “post‐metaphysical” condition not only tends to abolish the separation between the subjective person and “objective spirit,” but the distinction between culture and nature as well. For Sloterdijk, one co‐intelligent system now encompasses subject and object, culture and nature. This information ecology gives man a new fused identity with the other, with his world and his tools. He is no longer an identity apart. Such a civilization of co‐intelligent “anthropo‐technology” requires an entirely new perspective on ethics. For Sloterdijk, today's passionate debates over man's domination of nature or technology's domination of man miss the point because they are fearfully rooted in the obsolete master‐slave dichotomy that holds such a hallowed place in Western philosophy. As Sloterdijk sees it, this dichotomy, based as it was on the opposition between subject and object and between culture and nature, needs to be updated: In our time, master and slave are dissolved in the advance of intelligent technologies whose operability is non‐dominating. One can only talk about self‐manipulation, not slavery; not about a master, but about self‐mastery. Unleashing the basic force of nature against the people of Hiroshima may have been possible prior to the information revolution when “allo‐technology” (the division between man and machine) still predominated. But, the anthropo‐technology of the post‐metaphysical 21st century, Sloterdijk contends, holds out a generous promise. In this system bound together by information feedback and artificial intelligence, the preservationist instinct of the co‐beneficiaries of co‐intelligence will limit the destructive acts of anthropo‐technology against itself. Between the lines, Sloterdijk even seems to suggest that the “astraying” fate of alienated Being may at last find its dwelling place rejoined with nature and the world. In May 2000, Sloterdijk gave lectures at the Goethe Institute in Boston and in Los Angeles that covered these topics. Some excerpts appear below. — NATHAN GARDELS , editor     

Squaring the Palestinian triangle

Abstract

The 10 options offered so far to resolve the Palestinian conundrum have proved vain. New thinking that combines Palestinian self‐determination rights with Israel's security needs is necessary. The proposed solution rests on the following: (1) mutal acceptance of self‐determination for the Palestinians and the Jewish people, (2) mutual recognition of PLO and Zionism, (3) partition of Greater Palestine between Israelis and Palestinians, and (4) separation between sovereignty over territory and personal status of inhabitants.     

I'd like to be ethical,but they won't let me

To be ethical, the member of a modern organization must know what. the work requires of him (or her), what the organization requires of him, and what others require of him. But modern organizations put doing one's job before doing one's work and before one's duty to one's fellow man. Because they do so structurally, the individual usually cannot know what the effect of doing one's duty is on doing a good piece of work or on other human beings. This article attempts to make a beginning to show how far removed the structure of knowledge in modern organization is from constituting the basis for ethical behavior. The means chosen is a phenomeno-logical reconstruction of the ethical field that links the individual to objects, others, and self.     

Neural Darwinism

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

I Hope Artificial Intelligence Is Nice to Us

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

Teilhard's Take

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION IN THE NETHERLANDS: EXPANSION,DIVERSIFICATION AND CONSOLIDATION

The rise of Dutch administrative sciences is related to the post‐war expansion of the country’s welfare state. The growing welfare state needed scientific support for policy‐making and planning. Legal expertise alone was no longer sufficient. After the initial separation from administrative law, the post‐war policy and administrative sciences in The Netherlands were strongly oriented towards our American ‘big brother’. Since the 1980s, a growing self‐identity and self‐confidence has developed. The period from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s witnessed a steady expansion and diversification of Dutch PA sciences. The subject is now taught at 11 of the 13 Dutch universities. The enormous growth of the early 1990s is over, and student numbers have now stabilized – and at a substantial level, thus consolidating the position of PA departments in most universities. From the mid 1990s onwards Dutch administrative sciences have gone through a process of internationalization. Dutch PA sciences have as a result acquired a status of recognized quality in the international scientific community.     

Theology not Ecology

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

Beyond Being and Becoming

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

The Century of Biology

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

The Limits of Cloning

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

Neo‐Modern Ecology

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

Anthropo‐Technology

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

The Beginning of a New History

If the 20th Century was the century of physics, the 21st Century is the century of cybernetics, biology and ecology. Technological advance has both crossed new frontiers and discovered old limits. Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine broke new ground with his understanding that nature, including its human component, seeks to establish order out of chaos by “self‐organizing,” not only according to pre‐determined laws, but through random creative choices as well that are responsible for the endless novelty and potentiality of being. The technologically‐armed purposive role of humans in the Anthropocentric Age thus takes on a new significance: “What we do today depends on our image of the future rather than the future depending on what we do today” as Prigogine puts it. “The equations of the future are written in our actions as well as in nature. Time becomes construction.” Nowhere is this truer than in the new science of genomics, which touches the soul, and in the effort to preserve the ecological balance that has enabled humanity to flourish within the narrow band of earth's livable climate. In this section we bring together leading thinkers, scientists and technologists of our age to address these issues of mankind's fate.     

Import substitution,export promotion and the structure of Brazil's protection

Following a brief introduction the second section of this paper analyzes Brazil's policy of import‐substituting industrialization (ISI), as it relates to a number of variables suggested by economic theory. The third part investigates the inter‐industry structure of Brazil's protection as it relates to the country's comparative advantage in manufactured goods. Finally, the concluding section takes up certain policy implications suggested by the previous analysis.     

The Great Convergence and the Logic of One World

A great historical transition is underway from American‐led Globalization 1.0 to Globalization 2.0—the interdependence of plural identities where no one power or alliance of powers dominates. The G‐20 is floundering as the immediate global financial crisis has receded. The United Nations and the old Bretton Woods institutions—the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO—have lost their vigor and are struggling to adjust to the global powershift with the rise of the emerging economies. While Europe is paralyzed as the historic project of integration stalls, the world's two largest economies—the United States and China—are as yet unable to figure out how to share power. The danger now is that the geopolitical vacuum will invite assertions of national self‐interest that will unravel the rules‐based order that enabled stability and prosperity over recent decades. America's leading geopolitical strategist, China's most outspoken strategic thinker and one of Asia's leading global thinkers from Singapore offer their reflections on this state of affairs.