Agency in earth system governance: refining a research agenda

In the face of global environmental change, a key question for the social sciences is how to organize the co-evolution of societies and their natural environment. In this context, a new long-term research program, the Earth System Governance Project, proposes several key issues to be examined: architecture, agency, adaptiveness, accountability, and allocation and access. The contributions to this special issue have focused on the analytical problem of agency. For example, they have examined newly emerging or understudied agents of global environmental governance, or offered a fresh assessment of agency in the context of existing governance mechanisms such as the Clean Development Mechanism. This concluding article outlines several insights provided by the contributions to this special issue regarding four key questions underlying the study of agency in global environmental governance. First, they call attention to the ingredients or processes that characterize agency in the first place and thus distinguish actors from agents. Secondly, the authors highlight the differences among agents and how they interact with each other. Thirdly, they point toward variation in the ways that agents may acquire authority. Finally, the contributions to this special issue suggest that there may be several approaches to evaluating agency, with different consequences. Thus, taken together, the contributions to this special issue provide a starting point for broadening our understanding of agency in earth system governance.     

Who Benefits from Aid for Trade? Comparing the Effects on Recipient versus Donor Exports

Abstract

Recent studies offer an ambiguous picture on the effectiveness of foreign aid in strengthening the export capacity of recipient countries. Moreover, the literature on aid for trade (AfT) has often neglected the fact that exporters in the donor countries may be among the main beneficiaries. We simultaneously estimate and compare the effects of AfT on trade in both directions. We find that AfT increases recipient exports to donors as well as recipient imports from donors. The first effect tends to dominate the latter, which contradicts the sceptical view that donors grant AfT primarily to promote their own export interests.     

Morphology and phenomenology of death by kicking (II)

In the years from 1982 to 1995, 20,504 autopsy cases were examined at the Departments of Forensic Medicine in Hamburg and Greifswald. In 103 cases death was caused by kicking. In the Greifswald area, the occurrence of kicking as the cause of death could be demonstrated in 68 cases (30% of all homicides), which is in contrast to the observations in Hamburg, were kicking amounted to only 2.5% of the homicides. Most of the victims (average age 44 years) were under the influence of alcohol (mean blood alcohol concentration 1.75/1000), and most were on social support. The victims often showed other signs of blunt trauma such as blows with the fist and strangulation. In a few cases, cutting and stabbing wounds were also found. In the majority of cases death was due to severe haemorrhages and aspiration of blood in addition to the direct effects of the head injuries. The crimes were committed by one person in 46 cases, two in 20 and three in 4 cases. The perpetrators (average age 27.6 years) were always younger than the victims. Case reports show that fatal kicking was mostly triggered by relatively trivial arguments. None of the incidents were preplanned by the perpetrators. In contrast to an expected higher incidence of kicking deaths in the urban area of Hamburg, these crimes occurred ten times more frequently in the rural area of Greifswald.     

Business 2.0: Kyrgyz middlemen in Guangzhou

ABSTRACT

Among the many ‘businesspeople’ whom the promise of commercial success has drawn to southern China in recent years one can find a small number of Kyrgyz middlemen. Working mostly with Russian-speaking clients, their job is to organize buying trips, coordinate with local manufacturers, translate, and oversee cargo shipments. Based on ethnographic fieldwork since 2013, this article examines in detail the careers, work routines and business model adopted by Kyrgyz middlemen in Guangzhou. I argue that in contrast to the early bazaar or shuttle traders, who have been operating across Eurasia since the 1990s, these Kyrgyz middlemen constitute a next kind of economic actor within more diversified, service-oriented and formalized value chains across post-Socialist Eurasia (referred to here as Business 2.0). One of these middlemen’s most salient contributions is to translate between the informal and formal domains of national economies as well as within cross-border economic transactions.