Questions of Sovereignty: Redefining Politics in Scotland?

The issue of sovereignty has never been resolved in Scotland. The 1998 Scotland Act, creating the Scottish Parliament affirmed that the Westminster Parliament is sovereign, but this is disputed. In practice, the issue was left largely in abeyance as sovereignty was seen as an outdated concept. The Scottish independence referendum of 2014 and the UK Brexit referendum of 2016 both brought back the question of sovereignty in stark terms. Analysis of data from the British Election Study of 2019 with regard to (a) the right of Scottish self‐determination, and (b) the right of a UK‐wide majority to take Scotland out of the EU, allows us to identify ‘sovereigntists’ and ‘unionists’. Sovereigntists, on both dimensions, now constitute a majority. A smaller group of unionists reject both positions. There remains a group of ‘semi‐sovereigntists’ who accept Scottish self‐determination, but also that the UK as a whole should decide on Brexit. Controlling for the social and political factors, Scots are increasingly polarised around issues of sovereignty, which have become central to contemporary Scottish politics.     

Experimentalist interactions: Joining up the transnational timber legality regime

This paper analyzes the interactions between the separate components of the emerging transnational timber legality regime, both public and private. It examines how far, and through what institutional mechanisms, these interactions are producing a joined-up transnational regime, based on a shared normative commitment to combat illegal logging and cooperative efforts to implement and enforce it. The paper argues that the experimentalist architecture of the EU FLEGT initiative has fostered productive, mutually reinforcing interactions both with public timber legality regulation in other consumer countries and with private certification schemes. But this emerging regime remains highly polyarchic, with broad scope for autonomous initiatives by NGOs and private service providers, along with national governments, international organizations, and multi-donor partnerships. Hence horizontal integration and coordination within it depend on a series of institutional mechanisms, some of which are distinctively experimentalist, while others can also be found in more conventional regimes. These mechanisms include cross-referencing and reciprocal endorsement of rules and standards; recursive learning through information pooling and peer review of implementation experience; public oversight and joint assessment of private certification and legality verification schemes; and the “penalty default” effect of public legality regulation in consumer countries, which have pushed both exporting countries and transnational firms to comply with the norms and procedures of the emerging transnational regime. The paper's findings thus provide robust new evidence for the claim advanced in previous work that a joined-up transnational regime can be assembled piece by piece under polyarchic conditions through coordinated learning from decentralized experimentation, without a hegemonic power to impose common global rules.     

Toward “hardened” accountability? Analyzing the European Union's hybrid transnational governance in timber and biofuel supply chains

The voluntary/mandatory divide is a constant feature of scholarly debates on corporate accountability for sustainability in global supply chains. A widely held assumption is that the addition of state authority to private transnational governance in global supply chains will “harden” accountability and, thus, promote more sustainable production. The state's ability to set legally binding requirements is expected to coerce companies into complying. The hybridization of private and state authority is seen to strengthen good practice in private authority. This empirical study questions these assumptions based on an analysis of two hybrid governance arrangements for sustainability in global supply chains: the EU's Timber Regulation (EUTR) and Renewable Energy Directive (RED). The results demonstrate that both EUTR and EU-RED yield sector wide efforts of compliance and to this extent can be seen as enhancing accountability in the sense of answerability. At the same time, we find that the policies in both cases are not more demanding, nor enforced strictly, the latter putting into question their potential to coerce companies. Further, a “hardening” of accountability is at least obscured as both EUTR and EU-RED have stripped private authority they employ in their hybrid transnational governance from the need to establish legitimacy with a broader audience. This makes legal compliance and cost-effectiveness the core factor for companies’ efforts to demonstrate compliance. Our findings hence question whether the EUTR and EU-RED have led to “hardened” accountability compared to private transnational governance, and ask for an empirical, more nuanced understanding of what there is to gain or lose from hybridizing private and state authority in transnational governance.     

Not as bad as it seems: EU and US democracy promotion faces China in Africa

The rise of China in Africa is often described as a major challenge to the United States (US) and the European Union (EU) democracy promotion policies. China is accused of providing important volumes of loans, development aid, trade and investments without “political strings” attached, thereby undermining the US and the EU's possibilities to set material incentives for reforms. This article investigates Ethiopia and Angola as two cases where one would expect that the growing presence of China has made it more difficult for the EU and US to support reforms. Empirical findings presented in this article go against this argument. In both countries, the EU and the US face substantial difficulties to make the respective government address governance issues. However, the presence of China has not made it more difficult for the US and the EU to implement their strategies. Instead the empirical analysis suggests that domestic factors in Ethiopia and Angola, notably the level of challenge to regime survival both governments face, influence both governments’ willingness to engage with the EU and US.     

The 2014 Fiji Elections and the Methodist Church

Abstract

The Methodist Church of Fiji has around one-third of Fiji’s population as members, and is a strong influence on all aspects of Fiji’s life, including its politics. Since 2006 the relationship between the Methodist Church of Fiji and the Bainimarama regime has been variously tense, acrimonious and downright hostile, with Church conferences cancelled by the government in 2009–2011 after the Methodist Church was accused of ‘playing politics’. A further attempt to minimise the influence of the Methodist Church has included government encouragement of the New Methodists (Souls to Jesus) movement in 2008–9. However, these government actions have been premised on the assumption that the Methodist Church is monolithic in its support for conservative Fijian chiefly values, often privileging these over more universalist values espoused by other Christian denominations. While this may have been generally true of the years 1989–2012, it has not always been the case. This paper suggests that more recently the dynamics within the Methodist Church have changed, a shift that is only partly influenced by Bainimarama’s actions.     

The European Dimension to Scottish Constitutional Change

Scottish self‐government and European integration are linked. Europe has become an important framework for the independence project. Evidence for Scots being more pro‐European is ambivalent, but there is a pro‐European consensus in Scottish political parties and civil society. In the referendum campaign, the No side suggested that an independent Scotland might not gain admission to the European Union. If the United Kingdom as a whole should vote to withdraw from the EU in a future referendum but Scotland to stay in, the independence question would re‐emerge. In the absence of independence, a number of issues arise as to how Scottish interests can best be represented in the EU.     

National Parliaments after Lisbon: Administrations on the Rise?

In the wake of the Lisbon Treaty, much of the academic debate on national parliaments in the EU has focused on the new powers of national parliaments and the potential for the politicisation and parliamentarisation of the EU. In the process, the role of administrators in the parliamentary control of EU affairs has been neglected. This article addresses that gap by comparing parliamentary administrations to a set of ideal types on the basis of in-depth interviews and a comparative survey of parliamentary staff. This leads to the observation that the roles of parliamentary administrators have been further expanded after Lisbon to a range of tasks that go beyond technical support and include elements of agenda-setting.     

Comment faire «worker out» la délibération publique dans un contexte de rapports linguistiques complexes: spécificités des instruments délibératifs au Nouveau‐Brunswick

This study emphasizes the dimension of complex linguistic links (as is the case in New Brunswick ‐ the only officially bilingual province in Canada) and highlights optimizing conditions connected to deliberative instruments’ engineering, to their implementation and ensuing decision‐making processes. To do so, we mainly focused on elements slowing down those instruments’ efficiency, particularly for public policies development. Two dimensions or success conditions emerge from our analysis: 1) the substantive dimension which relates to the bilingualisation role of the instrument and, 2) the process dimension concerning the issue of referral – the role of the instigator and instrument bearer.