<Emphasis Type="Italic">Ansgar Klein,Ruud Koopmans,Heiko Geiling</Emphasis> (Hg.): Globalisierung,Partizipation, Protest

Ohne Zusammenfassung     

How crude: Advocacy coalitions,offshore oil,and the self-negating belief

Although the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) offers a promising approach for the study of policy change, other social science perspectives – specifically including human ecology – point to competing expectations. The ACF proposes that external perturbations are a necessary precondition for policy change; by contrast, work in human ecology draws attention to the potential for autogenic succession– cases where people or organizations act in ways that bring about their own demise. This difference in perspectives is tested with respect to a policy subsystem that has been found to offer a valuable context for examining ACF expectations, namely the U.S. federal program for offshore oil leasing. Many developments within this program have been quite consistent with ACF expectations; the rise to power of a new governing coalition in 1981, for example, did lead to a decided shift in policies, and the National Academy of Sciences did play roughly the role predicted by ACF. In addition, however, key sources of policy change were set in motion by members of the governing coalition itself – based on actions that were quite consistent with the policy core beliefs of the governing coalition, but not consistent with the assessments by independent scientists. The experience suggests that what is needed is not so much a rejection of the ACF as its refinement. Even without external perturbations, members of the governing coalition have the potential to undercut their own interests, if only because of the potential power of the self-negating belief. Ironically, this potential may be the highest in precisely those cases where the governing coalition has the greatest apparent ability to impose its own beliefs, and the lowest level of apparent need to respond to alternative or competing views.     

Collaboration,information, and preservation: The role of expertise in farmland preservation task forces

Collaboration between agencies, private groups, and citizens in the field of natural resource management is generally seen as a productive strategy in challenging management situations. Collaborative management is particularly appealing in efforts like farmland preservation, which depend for their success on local initiative and support. However, such partnerships may create new dilemmas about the appropriate use of information in management. This paper analyzes the use of information by 15 county-wide Farmland Preservation task forces in the state of Ohio, U.S.A.     

Waller R. Newell: <Emphasis Type="Italic">Tyrants: A History of Power,Injustice, and Terror</Emphasis>

Newell offers a typology of tyrants: the profit-and-pleasure-seeking “garden variety”; the would-be “reformers”; and the genocidal “millenarians.” Ranging widely across the globe and through the centuries, he provides a link between political philosophy and tyrannical practice that is often missing in the scholarly literature.