ICTs and decision making: findings from the Poverty Assessor

Pro-poor decision making depends on an understanding of the complexities and inter-relationships between household livelihood, demographic, and economic factors. This article describes the design and implementation of the Poverty Assessor, a software programme to assist practitioners, policy makers, and researchers in visualising the direct impacts on poverty of specific livelihood factors and events among populations living in poverty. The software enables users to upload their own data and profile households in relation to the national poverty line, by selecting from a range of demographic and livelihood indicators. The authors present findings from the programme, using a dataset from Bolivia.     

A typology of drivers' responses to speed cameras: Implications for speed limit enforcement and road safety

Abstract

Speeding is usually perceived as a minor crime but it is a major cause of road death. Reduced speeds should therefore lead to casualty reduction, and automatic speed cameras were introduced in England and Wales under the Road Traffic Act 1991 to help achieve this aim. A quasi-experimental study is described that assessed die impact of several kinds of speed camera deployment strategy in England on different types of driver. Twelve surveys were carried out in five police force areas, and more than 6800 drivels participated. While all modes of camera deployment led to lower speeds, driver types who ‘manipulated’ or ‘defied’ the cameras were least responsive to and respectful of than. Conversely, those who described themselves as ‘conforming’ to speed limits or ‘deterred’ by cameras approved of them most. Background characteristics of driver types, their perceptions of camera operation and behavioural responses to cameras arc discussed. The implications for speed limit enforcement and casualty reduction are considered in light of the findings.     

Another nation-building bloc? Integrating nationalist ideology into the EU and ASEAN

The article examines the compatibility of nationalist ideology and regional integration within the European Union (EU) and the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN). In exploring nationalist ideology as a third alternative to functional and identity-based approaches to regional integration, it contributes to debates on the necessity and desirability of a common supranational identity. Despite a hitherto largely transaction-based approach to integration, political elites in South-East Asia have expressed support for ‘ASEAN awareness’ or ‘cognitive regionalism’ in the hope of increasing the organisation’s social cohesion and solidarity. These constructs seek to supplement political and economic co-operation with a sense of imagined (regional) community, despite the lack of strong supranational institutions within ASEAN. Their aim is thus to replicate a quasi-national construct at the regional level, something which has met with relatively little resonance within EU member states. The similarities between government attempts to foster a sense of regional belonging and nation-building principles, let alone their interplay, have yet to be fully explored in the South-East Asian context. The article tackles the question of whether EU and ASEAN member states can learn from each other in developing approaches to regionalisation.     

Cruelty and the Imperative to Wage Virtuous War

This paper considers the newly imperative force of the jus ad bellum, when it acts as a guarantee of the moral. An emotive sense of cruelty now mobilizes as legitimate some forms of virtuous killing, whether in the 'war on crime' waged upon a country's own citizens, or in the conduct of war upon other nations. The recoil against cruelty authorizes virtuous wars against 'brutal' regimes, and underwrites the imposition of maximal penalties for atrocious crimes. Cruelty obliges military force, that naked arm of sovereign power, to be placed at the service of an ailing humanity. This turn towards a pitiful virtuous war suggests a jurisprudence critical of those intimations of cruelty that tend to secure compassion as an authorizing stamp, or guarantor, of the moral.