Common Ground for Action Software and Professional Development to Support Online Deliberation in Classrooms

The Common Ground for Action (CGA) online deliberation platform is a dynamic tool designed to encourage diverse group members to identify collective responses to deeply controversial or “wicked” public problems that have no simple solution. The program promotes authentic deliberation, while minimizing the tactics of horse-trading and negotiating. We detail the structure of the CGA platform, including how deliberative talk is encouraged, outline a sample assignment that can be used with CGA, and professional training offered to faculty and Teaching Assistants.     

Ontario Healthcare Coverage Eligibility Among New Permanent Residents: A Scoping Review

New permanent residents to Ontario can experience difficulties accessing health services due to the 3-month residency requirement for provincial healthcare coverage. This scoping literature review, which included peer-reviewed articles and gray literature from 1993–2013, examined the effects of the 3-month waiting period on the health of new permanent residents to Ontario, public health, and the health-care system. At the individual level, issues of affordability, pre-existing conditions, and quality of care were prominent throughout the literature. At a systems level, the policy was found to constrain various health-care settings, pose a risk to public health, and compound health-care system costs.     

Study in blue: trauma,affect, event

As contemporary student activists in the United States embrace a vocabulary of trauma and microaggressions, some critics on the left consider this a depoliticizing move symptomatic of the university’s growing thralldom to neoliberalism. The author argues that such criticism neglects how talk of trauma and microaggressions attempts to affectively manage structural violence’s failure to manifest in the form of discrete, identifiable, and extraordinary events. To illustrate this, she turns to the poetry of Claudia Rankine and the performance art of Emma Sulkowicz as aesthetic treatments of racial microaggression and sexual trauma, respectively. Rankine’s and Sulkowicz’s works belong to an emergent genre the author calls the coincidence report, in which subjects with no proof of structural violence except for their own feelings must cope with what happens when an event doesn’t. Ultimately, both artists sideline attempts to reconstruct the event in favor of redistributing specific affects throughout their respective publics. In both cases, these affects are blue – that is, depressive (Rankine) and obscene (Sulkowicz). Subjects in the blue find themselves ambivalently attached to living politically in the shadow of an event even as they detach from the fantasy that political life is less disappointing, depressing, or deflating than it actually is.     

Learning our way out of environmental policy problems: a review of the scholarship

In acknowledgement of the complexity of environmental challenges, research on learning in environmental policy has grown substantially over the past two decades across a range of disciplines. Despite this growth, there are few comprehensive assessments of the literature on learning in environmental policy. This article fills this gap by providing insights on the overall coherence and impact of this body of scholarship. To do so, we analyze a sample of 163 articles from 2004 to 2014 using a standardized coding framework. The results provide an in-depth assessment of the status of the literature on learning in the context of environmental policy, as well as the quality of the literature. We demonstrate that despite the diversity in research questions and goals, the literature is lacking with respect to diversity in cases and context, theoretical development, clear conceptualization and operationalization of learning, and advancements in empirical approaches to study learning. From these insights, we discuss the challenges and opportunities for scholars in studying learning and provide recommendations for building the theoretical and methodological rigor of the field.     

March divided,fight united? Trade union cohesion and government appeal for concertation

Why does the government appeal for concertation? Starting from the principal?agent framework and delegation theory, the article argues that the government is more willing to share decision-making power with trade unions when the policy preferences endorsed by the unions are closer to those of the cabinet. Furthermore, it maintains that government propensity to negotiate with trade unions increases as the heterogeneity of union policy preferences grows because the cabinet can exploit its agenda-setting power to divide the union front. The article tests these two hypotheses through a longitudinal analysis of the Italian case (1946–2014). In detail, it takes advantage of two original datasets built through content analysis that provide unique in-depth information on the policy preferences of parties and cabinets and measures the policy positions of the main Italian trade unions, thus allowing assessment of their reciprocal heterogeneity. The results confirm the expectations.     

External networks and institutional idiosyncrasies: the Common Security and Defence Policy and UNSCR 1325 on women,peace and security

In 2008, the Council of the European Union (EU) adopted a ‘Comprehensive Approach’ that outlines a strategy for securing gender mainstreaming; two years later, the Council introduced a set of indicators to assess its implementation. The EU was responding to the United Nations Security Council’s call for regional institutions to assist in implementing Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325, adopted on 31 October 2000, concerning ‘women, peace and security’. This resolution sought to meet the ‘urgent need to mainstream a gender perspective into peacekeeping operations’. Considering that prior exposure to gender issues, resources and well-established relations with civil society and gender advocates are lacking, the adoption of both the Comprehensive Approach and the indicators, as well as the structures and procedures established since then as part of the EU’s Common Security and Defence Policy, requires some explanation. This article draws on feminist institutionalist approaches to argue that the impetus for change came from individuals and groups within the EU who were involved in external networks, both above and below the supranational level, who seized on institutional idiosyncrasies that also shaped the implementation of UNSCR 1325 in important ways.     

Mind the Gap: Civilian Protection and the Politics of Peace Operation Design

Protecting civilians from conflict and atrocities has become a major focus of governments, the UN, and activists. Yet peace operations—the main policy instrument for directly shielding civilians from violence—vary widely in how well they are designed to do so. One much-maligned problem is a gap between a force's ambitions to protect civilians and its physical resources for doing so. Missions plagued by these ambitions–resources gaps gesture toward protecting civilians but are not designed to do so effectively. They can also worsen civilian suffering. This article explores the politics behind these gaps, focusing on the role of powerful states—especially major Western democracies—in creating and facilitating them. It argues that ambitions–resources gaps represent a form of organized hypocrisy that helps political leaders balance competing normative and material pressures to protect civilians while limiting costs and risks. Case studies of France's Operation Turquoise in Rwanda and US support for the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) in Darfur support the argument.