Implementing Environmental Sustainability in Local Government: The Impacts of Framing,Agency Culture,and Structure in US Cities and Counties

This article focuses on the organizational factors of environmental sustainability implementation in local government. We investigate the interactions, as well as direct and indirect impacts, of the framing of environmental sustainability and organizational culture and structure on implementation outcomes. We use a survey of 217 city/county planners and managers in 146 randomly selected American mid-sized cities and counties. The survey was specifically designed to tease out organizational features and their impacts. We model these impacts using structural equation modeling. We find that horizontally and vertically integrated organizational structure supports two essential dimensions of organizational culture: innovation adoption and consensus building. These cultural traits positively impact the framing of environmental sustainability at the core of organizations’ logic, which in turn significantly supports implementation outcomes. These findings provide important insights into city/county managers seeking to promote sustainability, and provide a base for future studies of the organizational factors of implementation.     

Structure,Agency And Hezbollah: a Morphogenetic View

The role and nature of Hezbollah’s involvement in Lebanese politics has been an omnipresent topic in Middle Eastern studies. The recent ‘Arab Spring’ uprisings further accentuated this complex role, given the party’s support for every single popular resistance movement in the Arab world, with the exception of Syria, its major political ally in the region. This stark contradiction highlights once again the question of how far Hezbollah should be perceived as a proxy client of both Iran and Syria or whether it represents an intrinsic and genuine local resistance movement. In this article I argue that scholarly treatment of Hezbollah’s nature, which has oscillated between structure-led, agency-led and dualistic types of analyses, is problematic. The article proposes a historically situated dialectical analysis of structure–agency which can potentially explain better how a legitimate social force can still be understood within the premises of proxy client politics.     

Presidential Leadership in a Fractured State: Capacity,Autonomy, and the American State

Abstract

This paper sets out a conceptual framework for studying the conditions under which presidential leadership in the United States can be thought of as autonomous. Unlike others, who view executive institutions as reflections of conflicts between dominant societal forces, I examine the case of the American presidency and focus on organizational–institutional considerations. Specifically, I focus on the process of institutionalization as a means of building capacity, which I argue, in contrast to others, is a necessary condition for autonomy. Additionally, Iargue that work on the presidency, and the American state in general, suffers from a level of analysis problem, which obscures opportunities for identifying and analyzing autonomous presidential leadership. I conclude with thoughts for a research agenda.     

The Internet and Anti-military Activism in Russia

This study investigates the forms and networks of civic activism on the Russian-language segment of the internet through the data of anti-military web pages and weblogs in 2007. The results of the web page analysis are complemented by interviews with Russian activists and discussed in the context of the role of the internet in Russian democratisation. Although the state of anti-military activism on the Russian internet currently seems fragmented, the role of the internet and one particular weblog platform, LiveJournal, are considered to contain important potential for future forms of Russian activism.     

Globalization, Neoliberalism and the Exercise of Human Agency

Globalization as a development model is generally now regarded as the sine qua non for development policy with little room for alternative theorising on capitalist development. Neoliberalism, as the supporting ideology of globalization, inflates the social significance of the market and mystifies human relations. It therefore, gives a distorted view of reality, how people are living and their agential capacity to improve their lives. Critical to human agency is it the way it is exercised—does it reduce inequality or does it exacerbate inequality? How is this human agency exercised by different groups of people? The paper provides a discussion on the relationship between neoliberal ideology, globalization and the exercise of human agency. It examines the social reality of globalization and neoliberalism and how this affects the agential capacity of human beings to direct their development, as individuals, communities and as nations.     

Sustainability,technology and corporate interest: Resource strategies in India's modern dairy sector

This article reviews aspects of India's Operation Flood dairy programme which reflect the extension of the internal and external linkages of India's co‐operative dairy sector. This discussion of the institutional linkages of Operation Flood leads to a broader debate about the dairy sector and development, particularly issues of corporatism, relative autonomy and dependence. Operation Flood institutions have embedded themselves securely within the political centre, enabling them to effectively intervene in policy‐making for the overall dairy sector, despite the programme's own limited performance in milk production and procurement. Foreign aid has facilitated this positioning, resulting in a subtle interplay of dependence and autonomy between the donors, the Indian state, local actors and Operation Flood as an autonomous interest.     

Sustainability Standards,Gender, and Nutrition among Smallholder Farmers in Uganda

Sustainability standards are gaining in importance in global markets for high-value foods. While previous research has shown that participating farmers in developing countries may benefit through income gains, nutrition impacts have hardly been analysed. We use survey data from smallholder coffee farmers in Uganda – certified under Fairtrade, Organic, and UTZ – to analyse impacts on food security and dietary quality. Estimates of instrumental variable models and simultaneous equation systems show that certification increases calorie and micronutrient consumption, mainly through higher incomes and improved gender equity. In certified households, women have greater control of coffee production and monetary revenues from sales.     

Evaluating Freedom of Information Laws: Objectives,Approaches, and Practical Considerations

Freedom of information (FOI) laws aim to improve the public’s opportunities to access official information from public authorities and hence to increase the level of transparency. Thus, it is important to know whether and to what degree the effects intended by establishing FOI laws are achieved and how their implementation could be improved. In order to answer these questions, FOI laws have to be evaluated. Unfortunately, attempts to evaluate FOI laws are still in their infancy. To promote sound evaluation, this article aims to provide guidance on how comprehensive FOI law evaluations might be designed and conducted.     

Partisan Activism and Access to Welfare in Lebanon

How do welfare regimes function when state institutions are weak and ethnic or sectarian groups control access to basic services? This paper explores how people gain access to basic services in Lebanon, where sectarian political parties from all major religious communities are key providers of social assistance and services. Based on analyses of an original national survey (n?=?1,911) as well as in-depth interviews with providers and other elites (n?=?175) and beneficiaries of social programs (n?=?135), I make two main empirical claims in the paper. First, political activism and a demonstrated commitment to a party are associated with access to social assistance; and second, higher levels of political activism may facilitate access to higher levels or quantities of aid, including food baskets and financial assistance for medical and educational costs. These arguments highlight how politics can mediate access to social assistance in direct ways and add new dimensions to scholarly debates about clientelism by focusing on contexts with politicized religious identities and by problematizing the actual goods and services exchanged.     

Moroccan City Festivals,Cultural Diplomacy and Urban Political Agency

Over the last two decades, cultural festivals have been established and consolidated in cities across Morocco. Their proliferation has coincided with the reign of Mohammed VI, well known as an enthusiastic and extremely wealthy patron of the arts, and the concomitant state-controlled democratization of Moroccan politics and society. Drawing on two examples—the Marrakech International Film Festival and the Mawazine music festival in Rabat—this article interrogates the ways in which festivals and the urban scale combine to function as vehicles for cultural diplomacy. Contra the common tendency in recent policy debates that perceive the city (with or without its administration) as an active agent in translocal cultural relations, I argue for a more nuanced perspective that understands the urban festival as a diplomatic platform through which the cultural politics of the state are rescaled and where a range of actors contest ideas about the local, national and global trajectories of society and cultural life.

     

Social Agency, Spatial Practices, and Power: The Micro-foundations of Fragmented Sovereignty in the Occupied Territories

The study of the relationships among social agency, spatial practices, and political power opens new directions for empirical inquiry and theorization of current modalities of sovereignty. Yet, recent research has overemphasized external variables, such as globalization and international forces, as conditioners of sovereignty and state power, with diminished attention on national and local realms. In the following article, I investigate state power beyond the limits of its official boundaries, by examining how intruder states produce, manage, and sustain effective authority over occupied territories and populations. I use the example of the Israeli occupation in the West Bank to demonstrate how such cases of political authority are based on fragmented sovereignty: comprised of multiple, localized, and relatively autonomous cores of power, instead of an all-encompassing structural and centralized modality of control. I propose that fragmented sovereignty is shaped and operated through the increasing autonomous power of ground level state agents and in the ways spatial perceptions and practices are interwoven into localized political processes.

Evaluating participatory development: tyranny,power and (re)politicisation

Ever since participation entered mainstream development discourse, critics have attacked it as form of political control. If development is indeed an ‘anti‐politics machine’ ( Ferguson, 1994 Ferguson J (1994) The Anti‐politics Machine: ‘Development’, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press)  [Google Scholar] ), the claim is that participation provides a remarkably efficient means of greasing its wheels. But do participatory practices and discourse necessarily represent the de‐politicisation of development? This paper aims to provide an answer in two distinct ways. First, it examines the ‘de‐politicisation’ critique, arguing that, while participation may indeed be a form of ‘subjection’, its consequences are not predetermined and its subjects are never completely controlled. Second, it investigates participatory development's ability to open up new spaces for political action, arguing that celebrations of ‘individual liberation’ and critiques of ‘subjection to the system’ both over‐simplify participation's power effects. To re‐politicise participation, empowerment must be re‐imagined as an open‐end and ongoing process of engagement with political struggles at a range of spatial scales.     

Embedded Activism 2.0: Re-shaping the Space for Civil Society in Russia and China

Abstract

NGOs have been seen as an integral part of civil society and a necessary feature of democratic transition. It has been argued that depoliticised NGOs in China ‘embedded’ in existing political structures would eventually bring about democratic changes through incremental actions, as they did in post-Soviet Russia. Both countries, however, recently witnessed the shrinking of political and legal space for public participation, especially for foreign-funded civil society organisations. This article analyses the impact of the NGO laws on civil society in Russia and China to update the embedded activism hypothesis. It draws on empirical data to describe the strategies that the NGOs use to adapt and how the future of the sector is perceived by young people in both countries.