The politics of Artificial Intelligence regulation and governance reform in the European Union

This paper explores political drivers and policy process of the reform of the framework for Artificial Intelligence regulation and governance in the European Union (EU). Since 2017, the EU has been developing an integrated policy to tighten control and to ensure consumer protection and fundamental rights. This policy reform is theoretically interesting, raising the question of which conceptual approaches better explain it, and it is also empirically relevant, addressing the link between risk regulation and digital market integration in Europe. This paper explores the policy reform mainly by using two case study methods—process tracing and congruence procedure—using a variety of primary and secondary sources. It evaluates the analytical leverage of three theoretical frameworks and a set of derived testable hypotheses concerning the co-evolution of global economic competition, institutional structure, and policy preferences of domestic actors in shaping incremental approach to AI regulation in the EU. It is argued that all three are key drivers shaping the reform and explain the various stages of the policymaking process, namely problem definition, agenda-setting, and decision-making, as well as the main features of the outcome.

     

A challenge for environmental governance: institutional change in a traditional common-property forest system

This article examines how the Miskito peoples of Río Plátano, Honduras have responded to agricultural expansion by migrant farmers and ranchers onto their ancestral forest lands, and considers the policy options for supporting the common-property system of the Miskito and the forests they have historically conserved. The analysis compares institutional changes in the common-property systems of three Miskito communities, each with a different history of colonization. The findings illustrate that the Miskito response to the colonists has been multifaceted, and that while the Miskito leaders have made institutional changes to strengthen their common-property system, these changes are not necessarily reflected in the daily decisions of the Miskito people. The findings suggest that policies that support indigenous rulemaking abilities, specifically policies that legitimize indigenous rights to their lands and provide the resources to apply those rights, may be vital to maintain robust common-property systems and the frontier forests in the region.     

Disentangling governance: a synoptic view of regulation by government, business and civil society

Governance became a catch-all concept for various forms of steering by state and non-state actors. While it pays tribute to the complexities of steering in poly-centred, globalised societies, its fuzziness makes it difficult to oversee who actually steers whom and with what means. By focussing mainly on actor constellations, the article disentangles governance into seven basic types of regulation, four of them representing public policies with varying degrees of government involvement and three depending solely on civil society (civil regulation), on businesses (industry or business self-regulation) or on both (civil co-regulation). Although each of the seven types is well known and extensively researched, they are rarely joined in a synoptic view, making it difficult to grasp the totality of contemporary governance. After introducing the seven basic types of regulation and co-regulation, the article addresses the interactions between them and it adds the widely used concepts of hybrid regulation and meta-governance in distinct ways. The synoptic view provided here helps to comprehend how governmental deregulation has been accompanied by soft governmental regulation as well as “societal re-regulation”. The concluding discussion emphasises that this “regulatory reconfiguration” is the cumulative product of countless, more or less spontaneous initiatives that coincide with forceful global trends. It also stresses that the various forms of regulation by civil society and business actors are not simply alternatives or complements to but often key prerequisites for effective public policies. Although the essentials of the typology developed here can be applied universally to a variety of policy issues, I focus it on how businesses are steered towards sustainable development and Corporate Social Responsibility.     

Ethics and good governance

Public Choice - Public choice research has revealed a variety of political dilemmas associated with governance that tend to make good governance unlikely. This paper suggests that the good...     

区域治理:地区主义视角下的治理模式

冷战结束以来国际社会所发生的一系列重大变革似乎预示着一个治理社会的来临 ,治理被成功地运用于国际关系的实际操作领域。区域治理则是治理模式与地区主义进程的巧妙结合 ,而欧洲联盟通常被认为是区域治理的一个成功模式。本文分析了地区主义与区域治理的互动关系 ,介绍了欧盟的治理模式 ,并以此为基础 ,展望了未来区域治理的发展趋势     

Indigenous governance

The governmentality literature's focus on mentalities of rule, and its aversion to sociological analysis, tends to produce a programmatic vision of governance. From this perspective, politics appears primarily as a mentality of rule, and resistance appears primarily as a negative – as a source of programme failure. This paper explores aspects of Australian policies of self-determination for Aboriginal peoples, in order to examine ways in which resistance (in the form of indigenous governance) plays a constitutive role in the formation of rule. Government and resistance articulate, mingle and hybridize, so that resistance cannot readily be thought of as external to rule. In this way, liberalism's governmental relations with resisstance are characterized by incorporation of resistant, ‘indigenous’, governances. In turn, this is a source of its innovativeness and flexibility, becoming part of its strategy of government at a distance. However, this incorporation creates tensions and contradictions within the liberal project itself, instabilities which cannot be reduced to the status of external sources of programme failure.     

The boundary conditions for regulation: Welfare systems,state traditions,and the varied governance of work safety in Europe

Studies of the relationship between the welfare and regulatory state have hitherto either focused on the latter displacing the former, or presented regulation as an alternative means for achieving welfare goals. Little is known, however, about their varied mutual interactions. This article addresses that gap by examining the coevolution of workers' compensation and occupational safety regulation in Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands. Drawing on an extensive international analysis of primary documents, secondary literature, and interviews with regulator, insurance, business, and labor representatives, the article identifies strikingly varied but stable national preferences for: (a) the use of financial versus regulatory instruments and (b) the allocation of regulatory responsibilities between state and nonstate actors. The article presents a novel explanation of that variation as dependent on the relative coherence of interactions between the particular cost‐control logics of welfare provision and wider norms and traditions of state action in each country.     

基层组织与乡村治理

农村冲突的不断升级以及组织化程度的提高 ,使得中国农村面临着形势严峻的治理危机。农村冲突主要针对基层政权和乡村干部 ,反映了基层组织既没有发展成为代表乡村社会利益的自治组织 ,而且也没有发展成为代表国家政权利益的代理组织。基层组织与乡村社会以及国家政权的利益之所以分离 ,是因为授权来源的变化 ,自身的优势地位以及生存危机的驱使。治理和善治乡村社会 ,必须依靠乡村自治运动和国家政权建设 ,必须再造基层组织体系特别是乡镇政府 ,必须建立农民利益的政治表达机制和建立农民协会。     

Clarifying multilevel governance

Despite its widespread use in European studies and beyond, the concept of multilevel governance (MLG) still suffers from a considerable degree of uncertainty as to its precise meaning, which in turn hinders the cumulative development of this research programme. In an attempt to stimulate a systematic methodological discussion of the idea of MLG, this article presents a critical reconstruction of the concept structured around three ‘axes of ambiguity’– the applicability of MLG beyond the European Union; the role of non‐state actors; the focus on policy‐making structures versus processes – followed by a conceptual assessment and clarification strategy based on John Gerring's criterial framework. Building particularly on Gerring's criterion of causal utility, the article argues that the MLG concept is best clarified along the (not necessarily exclusive) lines of two theoretical directions emerging from the literature: MLG as a theory of state transformation, and MLG as a theory of public policy. For each of the two models, the criterial framework also indicates a number of corresponding conceptual shortcomings which MLG scholars should try to reduce as much as possible in future refinements of this idea.     

Corporations at a crossroads: How multilevel governance interactions shape participation and effort in private governance regimes

This article argues that the interactions between firm agency in corporate management and the multilevel governance structures in which firms operate condition firms' participation and effort in private governance regimes. Empirically, I examine the Fortune Global 500 firms' decisions about participation and the extent of participation in the Carbon Disclosure Project during 2011–2015. Given firms' strategic considerations, the efficacy of corporate management structures and practices is conditioned by domestic regulatory and global regime contexts, and this efficacy varies across developed and developing countries. In developed countries, corporate, domestic, and global governance positively reinforce each other as drivers of private regulation on climate change. These governance levels are complements not substitutes. By contrast, the main drivers of participation and effort in developing countries are corporate management structures and practices, the stringency of domestic regulatory institutions, and their interactions. This article's results are robust to alternative specifications, including an alternative modeling approach.     

网络经济与政府治理创新

网络经济的迅猛发展和深度扩张,无疑将对我国经济和社会的发展产生重大影响。我国要想抓住机遇,摆脱困境,惟一的出路就在于创新。只有通过改进政府治理,广泛开展创新行动,我们才能在新一轮网络经济的竞争与发展中获得相应的收益和位置,才有可能赢得后来居上的竞争利益和发展前景。     

Academic faculty governance and recruitment decisions

We analyze the implications of the governance structure in academic faculties for their recruitment decisions when competing for new researchers. The value to individual members through social interaction within the faculty depends on the average status of their fellow members. In recruitment decisions, incumbent members trade off the effect of entry on average faculty status against alternative uses of the recruitment budget if no entry takes place. We show that the best candidates join the best faculties but that they receive lower wages than some lesser ranking candidates. We also study the allocation of surplus created by the entry of a new faculty member and show that faculties with symmetric status distributions maximize their joint surplus under majority voting.     

Adaptive management and adaptive governance in the everglades ecosystem

The Everglades is an intensively managed ecosystem where control of the water has allowed agricultural, urban and economic development, while struggling to meet biodiversity conservation goals. The over 100 year history of control began in response to a disastrous series of floods and droughts followed by environmental crises at an ecosystem scale. Each of these events precipitated technological fixes that extended control of water resources. Institutional structures have been continually reorganized over the last century to meet shifting social objectives, the latest of which is ecosystem restoration. However, the basic response, which employs engineering and technological solutions, is a type of social trap, where governmental mandates, planning-based paradigms and vested interests all interact to inhibit the resolution of chronic environmental issues. Experience from other resource systems indicates that in such an inherently complex system wrought with multiple uncertainties, restoration must be discovered through experimentation and learning embraced by adaptive management. Though minimal steps towards adaptive management have been made, we argue that adaptive forms of experimentation and governance are needed to resolve chronic resource issues and achieve restoration goals.     

城市社区自治的问题与对策

妥善解决政府与社区之间的关系,加强政府职能的转变,是社区自治建设的前提。在社区自治建设中,关注更多的利益相关者,运用现代治理理念,加强社区自治、治理组织体系与机制的构建,是实现城市社区自治的关键。社区工作者是社区自治建设中不可或缺的力量,该组织的健康发展,是社区自治建设的重要保障。