Experimentalism in transnational forest governance: Implementing European Union Forest Law Enforcement,Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership Agreements in Indonesia and Ghana

Over the past decade, the European Union (EU) has created a novel experimentalist architecture for transnational forest governance: the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative. This innovative architecture comprises extensive participation by civil society stakeholders in establishing and revising open‐ended framework goals (Voluntary Partnership Agreements [VPAs] with developing countries aimed at promoting sustainable forest governance and preventing illegal logging) and metrics for assessing progress toward them (legality standards and indicators) through monitoring and review of local implementation, underpinned by a penalty default mechanism to sanction non‐cooperation (the EU Timber Regulation that prohibits operators from placing illegally harvested wood on the European market). This paper analyzes the implementation of VPAs in Indonesia and Ghana, the two countries furthest advanced toward issuing FLEGT export licences. A central finding is the reciprocal relationship between the experimentalist architecture of the FLEGT initiative and transnational civil society activism, whereby the VPAs’ insistence on stakeholder participation, independent monitoring, and joint implementation review, underwritten by the EU, empowers domestic non‐governmental organizations with local knowledge to expose problems on the ground, hold public authorities accountable for addressing them, and contribute to developing provisional solutions.     

Kazin on Dreiser: What it Means to be a Literary Critic

Throughout his career as a literary critic, Alfred Kazin wrote often and with sympathy and insight about Theodore Dreiser, one of the most powerful, panoramic, and compassionate novelists in American literary history. Kazin was an intense reader and writer, committed in his books, essays, and reviews to connecting with and describing the personality of each author he examined. His interpretive work on Dreiser illuminates what it means to be a literary critic and teacher. When we read Kazin in the midst of twenty-first century theory, ideology, and professionalism, we realize all the more clearly the goal in his literary criticism that he aimed for, achieved, and represented—and that now is missing from literary education and experience.     

Where Do We Go from Here?

The left needs a fundamental rethinking of its politics for a new era. The first task is to understand the contemporary conjuncture: the dynamic combination of events and circumstances which structure a political settlement. Two such conjunctures have occurred in recent history. The first produced the postwar welfare settlement of 1945, which broke down in the economic crisis of the 1970s. The second took shape in the 1980s around the revival of liberal market economics and what became known as Thatcherism. It failed following the 2008 financial crash, and has begun to break apart with the vote to leave the EU. New political and cultural faultlines are confounding the orthodoxies of the governing class and cutting across the partisan loyalties of the main political parties. They herald the renewal of politics. But Labour is on the edge of an abyss. This article considers what the left can learn from Labour's previous periods of defeat and revisionism, and suggests where—if it survives—it should go next.     

Quadratic voting as an input to cost-benefit analysis

When agencies regulate, they must calculate the costs and benefits of their regulations. To do this, they must often price non-market goods—for instance, the value of protecting wildlife or the environment. Regulators have typically relied upon contingent valuation surveys to put prices on these types of goods. But contingent valuation surveys are fraught with error and often give rise to implausible valuations that cannot be trusted. Quadratic voting offers a better solution. Agencies should hold quadratic votes over nonmarket goods and use those votes to price the goods at issue.     

A Comparative Assessment of Elite Policy Recruits in Canada

Recent case studies and large-N survey evidence has confirmed long-suspected shortages of public sector “policy capacity”. Studies have found that government policy workers in various jurisdictions differ considerably with respect to types of policy work they undertake, and have identified uneven capacity for policy workers to access and apply technical and scientific knowledge to public issues. This suggests considerable difficulties for government’s ability to meet contemporary policy and governance challenges. Despite growing attention to these matters, studies have not examined the “elite” policy workers many governments recruit to address these capacity shortages. Using an established survey instrument, this study of two Canadian recruitment programs provides the first comparative analysis of elite policy recruits, as policy workers. Three research questions anchor the study: (1) What is the profile of these actors? (2) What types of policy work do “elite” policy analysts actually engage in? (3) How does their policy work compare by recruitment program? The article provides fresh comparative data on the nature of elite policy work and policy analytical capacity, but, more importantly, a crucial baseline for future comparative study of how elite recruitment may facilitate “supply-side” capacity gains expected from recruitment programs.     

Reproducing remoteness? States,internationals and the co-constitution of aid ‘bunkerization’ in the East African periphery

ABSTRACT

The physical and social retreat of international interveners behind the walls of ‘bunkered’ aid compounds in (putatively) more remote and dangerous regions of the South has been the focus of growing critical attention in recent years. An increasingly remote and fearful culture of risk aversion and differentiation among Western states and organizations has been largely identified as the driving force behind this set of practices. This article presents a different perspective on the bunkerization phenomenon through focusing on the agency of Southern states in the process. Exploring bunkerization across eastern/central Africa—and in Ethiopia’s eastern Somali region in particular—the study emphasizes not only how African states have been key promoters of modern bunkerization, but also how bunkerization behaviour and mentalities have historically characterized how many African borderlands—and contemporary sites of international intervention—have been incorporated into the global state system.     

The Pyu Ancient Cities World Heritage application: lessons from Myanmar on transnational advocacy networks

The announcement of 22 June 2014 from the World Heritage Committee that Pyu Ancient Cities had been added to the World Heritage List was significant for Myanmar, since it represented the country’s first World Heritage site. The World Heritage listing was the culmination of a process driven by a convergence of forces originating from within and outside of Myanmar. An interpretation of Pyu Ancient Cities as involving a transnational network of supporters echoes the work on transnational advocacy networks, which looks to phenomena involving transnational efforts to advance particular issues on behalf of activists against their government. This study examines Pyu Ancient Cities by producing a model that helps to illuminate the efficacy of its social network to engage in transnational advocacy.