Justice in a non-ideal world: the case of climate change

Ideal theory faces a paradox. The ‘capacity of guidance’ is an important feature of most normative theories, but ideal principles of justice are not well suited to guide action in non-ideal circumstances. This charge presses us to seek plausible avenues to connect ideal values with the non-ideal realisation of justice. The objective of this paper is to introduce an analytical framework and present a case study in support of what I call the ‘reflective integration thesis’. The thesis states that: if we wish to formulate principles of justice that can guide action in non-ideal circumstances, we need to integrate ideal and non-ideal theory, and the way to integrate ideal and non-ideal theory is by seeking reflective equilibrium between these levels. Taking climate justice as a model, this paper will explore the features of a non-ideal theory of justice, thereby providing insights about the structure of an action-guiding theory. It will show that, in order to guide action, our ideal principles of climate justice need to be reformulated in the light of real-world considerations, which we only obtain by integrating the relevant empirical work on the matter.     

Mechanisms for policy (dis)integration: explaining food policy and climate change adaptation policy in the Netherlands

Policy Sciences - Recent years have witnessed increased political interest to the challenge of organizing policy integration to govern societal problems that crosscut the boundaries of traditional...     

Global climate change: defining the policy problem

The U.S. appears to be misdefining the policy problem posed by the threat of global climate change, and is therefore not likely to find satisfactory policy solutions.The dominant definitions of the policy problem - alleging certain scientific, economic, and political barriers to effective policy - circumscribe the search for policy solutions. But those solutions meet neither practical criteria of rationality nor the test of practical experience. We seem to be trapped within problem definitions that reflect and reinforce the convergence of powerful interests with elements of the culture.The problem may be a culture that fails to integrate science-based technologies for mastering nature with ethical or political constraints on their use. and therefore jeopardizes its own sustainability. If so, then reasoned action begins with political leadership that challenges selected elements of the dominant culture and directs attention to alternatives - thereby opening up the search for solutions.     

Science and the climate change regime

Given rapidly increasing losses from extreme climate events, the world community already has a common interest in action to mitigate and adapt to climate change. However, this common interest is not well served through continued promotion of either mandatory (legally-binding) policies or do nothing policies by various participants in the regime established by the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. The common interest would be better served by a third way, comprised of voluntary no regrets policies that are commensurate with the limited political power of the regime and already have succeeded on small scales in reducing vulnerabilities to extreme climate events and in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Both mandatory and do nothing policies, as well as the regime itself, have depended upon scientists for political support in the past. But scientists might better serve the common interest of the world community through support of a third way in the future.     

Cooperation without the Leviathan: Intergovernmental policymaking in Canadian education

A staple of policymaking in any federation is intergovernmental cooperation, which can take the form of vertical initiatives between the central and substate governments or as horizontal initiatives among the substate governments themselves. Most research has focused the former whereby the central government often deploys powerful levers to encourage the constituent members to cooperate. Such accounts, however, cannot be applied to cases occurring without the influence of the proverbial Leviathan. This article sets out to identify conditions that may be conducive to horizontal cooperation, developing a set of propositions focusing on economic, institutional, and ideational factors. These propositions are then considered on three cases of cooperation with varying results in Canadian education. While no single factor can be identified as necessary and sufficient for horizontal cooperation, institutional and ideational conditions interacted in dynamic ways and appeared to play the leading roles in the outcomes presented here.     

Climate change adaptation in the Alpine Shire of Australia: a decision process appraisal

This study aims to integrate scientific knowledge from a variety of disciplines with local experience to describe, contextually and in detail, the impact of flood events on the community of the Alpine Shire and current mitigation efforts to alleviate and reduce these impacts. The Myrtleford Floodplain Management Study was the cornerstone of the strategy to address the goal of reducing flood damage in the community. It was found that the most consequential deficiencies in the Myrtleford flood mitigation scheme decision process are related to flaws in four elements of the process: the articulation of goals; the development of appropriate knowledge support; the effectiveness of promotion; and the ability to move from invocation to application. The Alpine Shire can be used as a microcosm that can represent adaptation challenges in other communities to climate change and extreme events. This research contributes to the development of the conceptual and analytical framework of integrated assessments, while making concrete contributions to the development of adaptive policies in Alpine Shire.     

Problems of transnational policymaking: Environmental policy in the European Community

Abstract. Environmental protection is inherently a cross-border issue, which might be thought to create opportunities for transnational regulation. This has significant potential consequences for European integration. However, two contrasting trends can be identified. On the one hand, the increasing magnitude of environmental problems, along with growing public and elite awareness of these issues, are generating responses which put the European Community at the centre of a process of 'regulation'. It is intended that this role should grow in the twin contexts of the Single Market and of increasing interaction with Eastern Europe with its vast pollution problems. On the other hand, however, the kind of 'political' policy intervention which environmental protection requires has not really developed. EC environmental policies have thus far been rather weak in both formulation and, especially, implementation, and even existing gains are likely to come under increasing pressure from the trend towards economic deregulation characteristic of the Single European Market project. Probably the most significant impact of Community efforts in the environmental field has been to encourage the convergence and strengthening of national regulation among member states, more than to create distinct European policy processes and institutions.     

Ideology-driven opinion formation in Europe: The case of attitudes towards the third sector in Sweden

Abstract. This paper uses attitudes towards the third sector in Sweden to test general assumptions about how citizens in West European political systems apply ideological schemas as shortcuts to political preferences. Attitudes towards the third sector are found to be affected by all ideological schemas reflected in the Swedish party system (state–market, Christian traditionalism, and growth–ecology). Contrary to what is implied by findings from America, these effects are very stable across socio–economic groups (especially those of the dominant statemarket schema). Similarly, no interaction effects of political sophistication could be traced, and the relative impact of the schemas remains the same regardless of whether or not the third sector is presented as an alternative to the welfare state. The implications of these findings for the nature of public opinion formation in ideologically clear and structured political systems are discussed.     

On filtering longitudinal public opinion data: Issues in identification and representation of true change

The Kalman filter is a popular tool in engineering and economics. It is becoming popular in political science, touted for its abilities to reduce measurement error and produce more precise estimates of true public opinion. Its application to survey measures of public opinion varies in important ways compared to the traditionally understood Kalman filter. It makes a priori assumptions about the variance of the sampling error that would not usually be made and does so in a way that violates an important property of the Kalman filter. Consequently, the behavior of the filter modified for public opinion measures is less well-known. Through simulations we assess whether and to what extent filtering: reliably detects the characteristics of time series; does so across series with different rates of autoregressive decay; and does so when the variance of the sampling error is unknown. We also examine whether the filtered data represents the level of true underlying variance and the extent to which filtering assists or hinders our ability to detect exogenous shocks. We learn a numbers of things. Most importantly, taking into account sampling error variance when filtering data can work well, though its performance does vary. First, filtering works best identifying time series characteristics when assuming a stationary process, even if the underlying process contains a unit root. Second, the performance of filtering drops off when we incorrectly specify the variance of the sampling error, and especially when we overestimate it. Third, when estimating exogenous shocks it is better to make no a priori assumptions regarding a measurement error variance unless we are absolutely certain we know what it is. In fact, applying the filter without specifying the measurement error variance is more often than not the best choice.     

Attentiveness to television news and opinion change in the fall 1992 presidential campaign

This paper examines the extent to which attention to television news impacted affective evaluations of presidential candidates during the last two months of the 1992 campaign. Our analyses show that attentiveness to campaign news significantly influenced evaluations in a manner consistent with the tone of news coverage for each candidate. We disaggregate the data by party and ideology, however, and discover this effect to be conditional, depending critically on the character and intensity of political predispositions. Throughout the paper we emphasize the interplay between political predispositions and the valence of network coverage, underscoring the contingent effect of media messages. We conclude with a brief discussion of our results and stress the importance of partisan reinforcement, which we found was a major consequence of news media reception during the fall 1992 campaign.     

Public opinion during a presidential campaign: Distinguishing the effects of environmental evolution and attitude change

This paper develops a spatial model which distinguishes between different sources of temporal variability in public opinion over the course of an election campaign. Candidates and citizens are shown as points within a space. The candidate points are fixed, but their relative positions can change as a result of change over time in the dimension weights. If this occurs, it represents environmental evolution. The individual citizens' points also can move within the space, independently of the external environment. To the extent this occurs, it represents attitude change. The model is tested with data from the CPS 1980 National Election Study. The empirical results show that much of the variability in public evaluations of the candidates is due to evolutionary changes in the electoral environment, rather than individual-level attitude changes. Furthermore, that attitudinal change which does occur is strongly delimited by factors like partisan strength, interest in the campaign, and political participation.     

Interest groups and policymaking in the American states

States in which candidates endorsed by liberal interest groups are more successful at the election polls tend to have higher Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) benefits and to enact more consumer protection legislation. In addition, states where interest-group-endorsed candidates are more successful at the polls tend to spend more on highways.     

Reforming rent control in New York City: the role of research in policymaking

This document describes the role of the New York City Rand Institute and other research groups in the rent control reforms enacted by the New York City Council in June 1970, summarizes the major research and analytical studies performed in this connection by Institute staff members, and offers some lessons for those contemplating similar work for public agencies.Much of the material included here was presented at the November 1970 annual meeting of the Regional Science Association as part of a session devoted to the Institute's housing studies, and will appear in Vol. XXVII of the Proceedings. The section of this paper summarizing our research studies borrows heavily from a similar summary prepared by my Institute colleague, Michael Teitz, for another occasion; I am grateful for his permission to use it here.     

After the green gold rush: the construction of climate change as a market transition

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of a representation of climate change amongst business and political elites as an axiomatic frame of long-term economic strategy. In this representation, the rationale for action on climate change is liberated from the premise of an exogenous physical threat, and replaced by incentives endogenous to the market in the form of opportunities in the so-called carbon economy. The relationship between climate science and action upon climate change has in this process become markedly different from common assumptions whereby science is either ignored or obfuscated, or followed faithfully as the evidence base for policy. Strikingly, the abandoning of climate ontology as irrelevant to corporate decision-making has enabled a large-scale investment of capital into the policies nominally designed to tackle climate change.     

The international politics of climate change after Brexit

The Paris Agreement provides a framework for achieving cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions that could mitigate the worst of global warming, and there has been a trend of increased participation and stronger national institutional support, cooperation and ambition towards that end. Among EU states, the United Kingdom has led that trend for three decades. The uncertainty introduced by the Brexit vote may weaken it.