Building consensus for affordable housing

Abstract

At one time the national goal of affordable housing was a widely held consensus that led to decent housing for millions of Americans. Today, proponents of affordable housing must negotiate with diverse and sometimes hostile parties to secure project approvals. Discussions are frequently adversarial, and stalemate is too often the result. The consensus has collapsed.

If progress toward affordable housing is to be made, proponents will have to recast the way they operate within this new environment. More than new financing plans or recommendations for regulatory relief are needed. Attention must also focus on the processes by which groups address divergent interests and come to agreement. “Principled negotiation,” a form of joint problem solving, when coupled with third‐party intervention, offers a promising and effective means of dealing with this hostile environment.     

A Policy Delphi study in the socialist Middle East

The Delphi Method has been applied to a wide variety of predictive and consensus building problems in the West. It has achieved mixed success in its ‘native’ environment. This paper reports on the successful use of the Delphi by an interdisciplinary, international team of English-speaking consultants in an Arabic-speaking country, politically dominated by a centralist regime. In the sixth year of the Iran-Iraq war, a group of international consultants proceeded with the development of a master plan for the development of the City of Baghdad, the Greater Baghdad Area and Central Iraq. Work on the plan had begun in 1982 but had been slowed by the war and its effect on the Iraqi economy, a lack of consensus on the part of the Iraqi government and a substantial degree of uncertainty in the government's confidence in the consulting team's perceptions. An accelerated form of the Delphi was structured and applied over a period of three weeks, employing high ranking members of the Iraqi technocracy. The results indicated a good degree of consensus on a number of material issues. The consultants obtained a clearer picture of the client's desires, and the client was left with greater confidence in the consultant's perceptions of the planning problems and solutions. There was a notable reduction in the level of uncertainty and disagreement among both Iraqi and expatriate members of the planning team. Finally, there was an increased acceptance of the resulting master plan due to the demonstrable participation of senior government officials in its formulation and the credibility they attached to the process of the Delphi. At the time of writing, the plan has been accepted by the government of Iraq.     

The reform of academic tenure in the United Kingdom

In this paper, we examine the reform of academic tenure in the United Kingdom (UK) after the 1988 Education Reform Act.¹ We test the hypothesis that softening tenure encourages incumbent academics to consolidate their hold on academic life [ Carmichael (1988)]. We also assess the economic significance of the English and American case law on tenure, because an understanding of the legal aspects of tenure is required to identify the possible effects of tenure reform. The years after passage of the Act provide an interesting natural experiment, as the broad effect of the legislation was to soften, though not to remove, tenure in British universities. ² We can find support for the Carmichael hypothesis prereform but do not believe that the Act caused incumbent academics to consolidate their hold on senior posts after the reform.Tenure implies that the holder of a post cannot be removed from it except for good cause, usually based on gross moral turpitude or gross incompetence. Such removal is historically characterized by a costly procedure governed by organizational statutes, as shown in Hines v. Birkbeck College.³ In the United Kingdom, academic tenure has been associated with open-ended contracts of employment and often had a particularly hard form before 1988. In the United States, where it has often been possible to dismiss academics for financial reasons by abolishing whole departments, tenure has taken a softer form (although often harder to obtain) and can still be held to exist even when an employment contract is of a fixed term as long as it is renewable. ⁴ The details of universities’ tenure statutes have always varied between institutions, in both the United Kingdom and United States, which is often overlooked.

Abstract

“Before 1988, could your university make academics redundant by giving notice and paying statutory redundancy pay, or was it extremely hard to sack academics—having to buy them out or use arguments based on gross moral turpitude or incompetence?”     

The need for protection and punishment in victims of violent and nonviolent crime in the Netherlands: The effect of relational distance

A crime victim’s relationship to the offender is widely recognized as an important variable in the study of victims and the criminal justice system. However, studies concerning comparisons of the needs of victims at various relational distances to the offender are lacking. The authors studied how the victim’s need for protection and punishment correlated to the victim’s relational distance to the offender. The authors distinguished more than the usual two victim-offender relationships (known vs. stranger offender), so that the needs of victims at intermediate relational distance (offender is known to the victim, but not an intimate) to the offender might become visible. A total of 370 victims were interviewed about their reasons for reporting the crime. Respondents were divided into three groups: small (intimates), intermediate (nonintimates), and large (strangers) relational distance. While controlling for gender of the victim and type of crime, the needs of victims were found to vary with the relational distance to the offender.     

The Dynamics of Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Understanding the Domestic Security Dilemma

This article argues that the concept of the “domestic security dilemma” can help us to better understand public opposition to government counterterrorism policies. It examines the concept of the “security dilemma” in international relations theory and argues that this concept can also be applied to the analysis of domestic security politics. The article explains that when the government takes actions intended to make people safer from terrorist threats, it often has the unintended consequence of heightening concerns about government oppression. Thus, counterterrorism represents a “domestic security dilemma”—a situation where security tradeoffs have consistently undermined anticipated security gains.