When ADR becomes the law: A review of federal practice

Conclusion With the passage of the Administrative Dispute Resolution Act, the stage was set for innovation and change in federal agencies. Now, part way into the five-year life of the Act, a new administration has the potential to encourage even wider use of ADR at the federal level, providing still more examples from which to develop a clearer sense of best practice. Additional funds, both for ACUS and individual agencies, are vital to providing the level of experimentation, innovation, and documentation needed to ensure success.MIT ProfessorLawrence E. Susskind is director of the MIT-Harvard Public Disputes Program, 512 Pound Hall, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass. 02138.Eileen F. Babbitt is associate director of the Public Disputes Program.Phyllis N. Segal is a practicing mediator with Endispute, Incorporated.The authors would like to acknowledge the federal dispute resolution specialists who contributed greatly to our work by providing interviews and materials for this article: Cathy Costantino of FDIC; David Batson of EPA; John Settle and Ron Walczak of HHS; David Drabkin of DLA; Jim Jones of DOL; Sheldon Guttman of FCC; Charles Pou of ACUS; Jeff Domber of GSA; and Diane Liff of DOT.     

A Pragmatic Response to an Unexpected Constraint: Problem Representation in a Complex Humanitarian Emergency

This paper elaborates a model of problem representation first presented by Billings and Hermann (1998) . The foreign policy process begins when decision-makers specify policy goals and identify relevant constraints in response to a perceived problem. Although this initial problem representation often sets the course for subsequent policy, unanticipated constraints can arise that catch decision makers off-guard. Finding themselves in a context they did not anticipate to be in, decision makers may choose to alter their representation of the problem and/or change the course of policy. Billings and Hermann offer one piece of this puzzle by examining how decision makers re-represent problems; this paper provides the second piece by assessing how policies, not representations, change in response to new constraints. A case study of the U.S. response to the Ethiopian famine in the mid 1980s demonstrates that policy does not always follow problem representation.     

Back to prehistory: the quest for an alternative IR founding myth

Abstract

Searching for an alternative founding myth for international relations (IR) entails going back long before the 1648 Westphalian milestone. Drawing from a world historical approach, this article makes the case for investigating the origins of the subject matter of IR in the pre-state era: its founding moment may be traced back to a first encounter between two distinct bands of nomadic Homo sapiens hunter-gatherers in the Palaeolithic period. As the outcome of this interaction was not predetermined, four scenarios are considered: absence of relations by retreat and isolation; conflict triggered by self-preservation (birth of war); cooperation, barter or other types of exchange; and merging together. Following the initial engagement, intergroup relations became much more intertwined. Once the stranger was no longer unknown, the original distinction between Us and Them began to fade away. The ensuing relationship shaped their co-constructed social reality, in a long process of extending trust beyond the family circle.     

Changing families and communities: an LGBT contribution to an alternative development path

Until now, most discussions on the place of lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender (LGBT) people in global civil society have focused on their access to citizenship, rather than their socio-economic rights and role in development processes. This article argues that an alternative vision of development should challenge heteronormative family structures; build alternative, queer communities; wage activist, sexually emancipatory campaigns on concrete social issues (as the Treatment Action Campaign has done on HIV and AIDS in South Africa); and rethink existing models of democratic participation. The author emphasises the paradoxes of LGBT organisation in the context of neo-liberalism and globalisation, with an eye toward queering, or challenging heteronormativity in, global social-justice movements.     

Mediating public disputes: A response to the skeptics

Conclusions There are more than 75 well-documented cases of successful dispute resolution in the public sector (and a great many more that are less well-documented). The evidence attesting to the merits of non-adjudicatory approaches to dispute resolution is mounting rapidly.While there are some public disputes that do not lend themselves to informal resolution (i.e., disputes involving fundamental freedoms or rights), many involving conflicting interests and values have proven resolvable in a win-win fashion. The most important preconditions for success have been the presence of a credible nonpartisan facilitator or mediator, parties in an undeniably interdependent situation and pressure created by a decision maker who has promised to act (using traditional decision-making methods) in the absence of a consensus. In short, given these preconditions, there are a number of good reasons to forge ahead with efforts to employ mediation and other forms of dispute resolution on a more regular basis. Lawrence Susskind is Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Executive Director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, Mass. 02138. Co-author ofResolving Environmental Regulatory Disputes (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1984), he has served as a mediator of public disputes at the local, state and federal levels.     

欧盟移民治理:建立统一移民政策的尝试

本文回顾了二战以来西欧国家移民政策的发展演变过程,指出了欧盟东扩背景下欧洲移民新趋向会对欧盟现有移民政策提出挑战,使欧洲移民政策面临困境.为应对日趋复杂和日益严重的移民问题,欧盟对其成员国的移民政策进行了多方面的协调,就建立统一移民政策进行了艰难的尝试.本文结合国外最新研究成果,对今后若干年内欧盟移民的趋势以及欧盟移民政策的调整方向做出预测,指出欧盟目前正在实施多层级移民治理的模式.     

A game theoretic approach to coalition politics in an indian state

The objective of this research is to formulate a game‐theoretic formulation of the coalition politics in the state of West Bengal, India. Political history of this state in the sixties is analysed and put in a game theoretic structure. It is then used to derive the theoretical solution which was found to be the same as the real situation. It is also indicated how the model can be used to predict the coalition structure in the future.     

Communicating to an Ideal Audience: News and the Notion of the 'Informed Citizen"

The news genre presupposes an ideal audience type-the ''informed citizen." Here, I will address what it means to ''be informed." How should audiences be addressed to enable them to become informed citizens, compared to addressing them as consumers? I will argue that when going beyond the official status attributed to news, one might find that viewers have contradictory feelings regarding the genre. I will provide examples of such news-related ambivalences and frustrations from my own research.     

Participatory development: an approach sensitive to class and gender

This article begins by presenting development experience gained in the Indonesian province of Irian Jaya as a means of highlighting the centrality of popular participation to the development process. Important lessons from the ongoing development work in Irian Jaya were that it is not sufficient to consult beneficiaries and then act on their behalf or to engage in a development process unless the participants understand the project's conceptual orientation and language and have the tools to assess their needs and options for constructive change effectively. Also, developers must supply participants with information about the larger economic and political context in which they are operating. The article continues with an exploration of the ways in which a focus on class and gender raises participatory development to a new level. Constraints on transformative participation are then defined as 1) the political conditions and power structures existing in the country and community, 2) administrative opposition, 3) sociocultural impediments, and 4) limitations imposed by daily life. While it may be impossible to avoid the effects of such constraints, development agents can help villagers anticipate their impact and support efforts to cope with them. Participatory development challenges the status quo by enhancing economic equity and social equality and, if effective, will engender opposition, especially when a large amount of funding is at stake. Opposition can take many forms, including ridicule or resistance and can get personal. The demand to produce quick results also creates restraints on development agents. It is concluded that the development agent must engage key sectors of the local population in the development process and nurture this participation. Development agents should act as facilitators rather than independent initiators telling people what is best for them. Development agents must become very familiar with the community to earn the trust that is needed to guide people toward self-analysis and priority-setting.