LEGAL ISSUES IN EVALUATION RESEARCH*

Using a 1978 evaluation of a defensible space project which was published in the Social Science Quarterly, and later challenged by the originator of the project being evaluated this article explores the legal issues and considerations for those reporting evaluations and the journals which publish the evaluation reports. Serow outlines the information gathered in interviews with several practicing attorneys, a university press, two law school professors, a political science professor, an attorney in a University Legal Counsel's office and from a review of relevant legal references. She concludes the article with five recommendations for evaluators reporting their research.     

Seeing Like a City: The Dialectic of Modern and Premodern Ways of Seeing in Urban Governance

Studies of urban governance, as well as the overlapping literature on law and space, have been heavily influenced by critical analyses of how spatial techniques helped constitute modern disciplinary powers and knowledges. The rise of land‐use control and land‐use planning seem at first sight to be perfect examples of the disciplining of populations through space by the kind of governmental gaze dubbed by Scott (1998) as “seeing like a state.” But a detailed genealogical study that puts the emergence of the notion of “land use” in the broader context of urban governance technologies reveals that modernist techniques of land use planning, such as North American zoning, are more flexible, contradictory, and fragile than critical urbanists assume. Legal tools of premodern origin that target nonquantifiable offensiveness and thus construct an embodied and relational form of urban subjectivity keep reappearing in the present day. When cities attempt to govern conflicts about the use of space through objective rules, these rules often undermine themselves in a dialectical process that results in the return to older notions of offensiveness. This article argues that the dialectical process by which modernist “seeing like a state” techniques give way to older ways of seeing (e.g., the logic of nuisance) plays a central role in the epistemologically hybrid approach to governing space that is here called “seeing like a city.”     

Informal interference in the judiciary in new democracies: a comparison of six African and Latin American cases

This article focuses on the efforts of power holders – at the executive or the legislative level – to influence or curb court activity informally or extra-legally, an acknowledged but under-researched topic in studies of judicial politics. We first define informal judicial interference and operationalize the concept; we then explain how we collected information on the topic through systematic cross-country interviewing. Our concept focuses on judicial intervention actions exercised by political actors once judges are on the bench. We distinguish these actions according to type – direct or subtle – and further differentiate each type according to six different modes. We provide new empirical data on informal interference in six third-wave democracies, three in Africa (Benin, Madagascar, and Senegal) and three in Latin America (Argentina, Chile, and Paraguay). Our empirical findings, first, confirm the importance of informal practices in shaping political-judicial relations. Second, they point to long-standing legacies and to the level of socio-economic development as possible explanations for different performances in terms of the prevalence and severity of informal interference in the judiciary in these newly established democratic regimes     

Population data from the New South Wales Aboriginal Australian sub-population for the profiler plus autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) loci

It is a requirement that forensic DNA profiling evidence be accompanied by an estimation of its weight, in order that the court can assign an appropriate probative value to it during legal proceedings. There are various models by which this estimation can be made, but each relies on approximations of the allele frequencies in the relevant population. This report provides the results of population genetic analyses at nine autosomal short tandem repeat (STR) loci for the Aboriginal Australian sub-population of New South Wales, Australia.     

The Multiple Bases of Social Return Platforms: Evidence of a Brazilian Initiative

The literature on platforms emphasizes the balance between supply and demand as precursors to network expansion, strategy development and strategy sustainability. This study questions this logic through the exploratory approach of a public platform based on social returns. Results demonstrate that when an institutional force supports a platform concerned with diffuse and collective interests, it is possible that the strategy could sustain and develop without the balance of its forces. The study contributes to the strategic platform literature by pointing out the distinct aspects of social platforms and underlining the support generated by institutions.     

Organised crime and international aid subversion: evidence from Colombia and Afghanistan

Scholarly attempts to explain aid subversion in post-conflict contexts frame the challenge in terms of corrupt practices and transactions disconnected from local power struggles. Also, they assume a distinction between organised crime and the state. This comparative analysis of aid subversion in Colombia and Afghanistan reveals the limits of such an approach. Focusing on relations that anchor organised crime within local political, social and economic processes, we demonstrate that organised crime is dynamic, driven by multiple motives and endogenous to local power politics. Better understanding of governance arrangements around the organised crime–conflict nexus which enables aid subversion is therefore required.     

Evolving together: transboundary water governance in the Colorado River Basin

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - Transboundary collaboration between the United States (US) and Mexico in the Colorado River Basin has heightened in recent...     

Minustah’s Legitimacy and the ‘Security-first’ Approach: Reassessing Statebuilding and its Violent Features in the Case of Haiti

ABSTRACT

The article aims to reassess the statebuilding endeavour of international interveners in the case of Haiti, from an interpretative and socio-historical perspective. First, the article analyses the existing critical literature on statebuilding and the growing literature on peacebuilding and legitimacy. Second, it introduces the case of Haiti, analysing the process of state formation and the production of the present conditions in the country. It then presents an assessment of Minustah, arguing that the lack of a local source of legitimacy, connected to a ‘security-first’ statebuilding approach, led the intervention to reinforce the predatory and undemocratic logics of Haitian politics.