Cultural Penetration and Punctuated Policy Change: Explaining the Evolution of U.S. Energy Policy

Punctuated equilibrium theory (PET) suggests that the policy process is characterized by long periods of incremental change and short periods of punctuated change. The impetus for the latter is usually a focusing event that breaks open policy monopolies, allowing for major changes in legislative decision making. While a burgeoning body of literature, a shortcoming in the PET literature is that it has yet to explain why focusing events and subsequent breakdowns in policy monopolies sometimes fail to result in punctuated policy. We integrate theories on cultural change with punctuated equilibrium to explain why focusing events do not always result in the dramatic policy changes that we might expect. Specifically, we use the context of national energy policy and the lexical database, Google Ngram Viewer, to trace punctuating energy‐related events and the occurrence or lack thereof subsequent policy change from 1952 to 2000.     

近期的印尼经济形势与政策调整

印尼经济经过1998年严重衰退后,从1999年和2000年开始缓慢走向复苏,但复苏的道路依然漫长。2001年印尼经济仍会增长,估计基本维持去年5％左右的水平,但不排除发生意外的可能。如果印尼再次发生政治和社会危机,印尼经济又将跌入危机的深渊。在印尼经济恢复的过程中,政治起着非常关键的作用。     

Experiencing Globalization: Active Teaching and Learning in International Political Economy

This article explores the teaching and learning challenges for the discipline of international studies (IS) that arise from the contemporary social, economic, and political changes usually labeled "globalization." The focus is upon the challenge posed to IS by a transformation in the nature of the relationship of teachers and students to the subject matter that they study: that is, teachers and students increasingly experience and contribute to globalization in the course of their daily lives as they simultaneously teach and learn about it. Significantly for the study of globalization in IS, pedagogical debates surrounding active teaching and learning highlight the potential for strategies that actively engage students' interests and everyday experiences with the subject itself. On this basis, the article outlines some potential routes into the active teaching and learning of globalization in the field of international political economy, illustrating these with examples from classroom activities and exercises.     

The political economy of global firms from India and China

This article attempts to build a bridge between contemporary studies of global firms from emerging economies and existing theories in comparative political economy. It argues that given the primacy of the state as an economic actor in developing countries, the variety of capitalism literature could provide a theoretical foundation for firm-level analyses of emerging market multinationals. For example, the authors suggest that China and India may be moving towards a ‘hybrid market economy’. They also offer a typology of Indian and Chinese corporates to demonstrate an empirical approach to analysing domestic business–government relationships and the ways in which these firms are shaped by the peculiarities of their respective institutional setting. Finally, they identify some of the likely pitfalls of doing cross-national comparisons of emerging market multinationals, particularly with respect to the reliability of corporate data.     

共享经济平台劳动者就业及劳动关系现状 —— 基于北京市多平台的调查研究

本研究运用北京市"新技术新业态新模式蓬勃发展对职工队伍和劳动关系的影响及应对举措"专题调研数据(1),通过整合定性和定量要素的混合方法,分析了共享经济平台劳动者就业的特征以及劳动关系的现状与问题。结果表明,共享经济平台就业呈现出低门槛、高灵活性、去劳动关系化的特点。共享经济平台为劳动者提供了大量就业机会和新的工作模式,在帮助劳动者提升收入水平的同时,劳动者可以较为自由地安排工作时间。但同时,共享经济的发展对传统劳动关系秩序产生了巨大挑战。传统劳动法律体系不适应共享经济的发展,劳动者与共享经济平台的法律关系不明确,平台从业者的劳动权益保护问题应引起重视。     

‘Triple wins’ or ‘triple faults’? Analysing the equity implications of policy discourses on climate-smart agriculture (CSA)

This paper analyses contrasting discourses of ‘climate-smart agriculture’ (CSA) for their implications on control over and access to changing resources in agriculture. One of the principal areas of contestation around CSA relates to equity, including who wins and who loses, who is able to participate, and whose knowledge and perspectives count in the process. Yet to date, the equity implications of CSA remain an under-researched area. We apply an equity framework centred on procedure, distribution and recognition, to four different discourses. Depending on which discourses are mobilised, the analysis helps to illuminate: (1) how CSA may transfer the burden of responsibility for climate change mitigation to marginalised producers and resource managers (distributive equity); (2) how CSA discourses generally fail to confront entrenched power relations that may constrain or block the emergence of more ‘pro-poor’ forms of agricultural development, adaptation to climate change, or carbon sequestration and storage (procedural equity); (3) how CSA discourses can have tangible implications for the bargaining power of the poorest and most vulnerable groups (recognition). The paper contributes to work showing the need for deeper acknowledgement of the political nature of the transformations necessary to address the challenges caused by a changing climate for the agricultural sector.     

The Capitalocene Part II: accumulation by appropriation and the centrality of unpaid work/energy

This essay – Part II – reconceptualizes the past five centuries as the Capitalocene, the ‘age of capital’. The essay advances two interconnected arguments. First, the exploitation of labor-power depends on a more expansive process: the appropriation of unpaid work/energy delivered by ‘women, nature, and colonies’ (Mies). Second, accumulation by appropriation turns on the capacity of state–capital–science complexes to make nature legible. If the substance of abstract social labor is time, the substance of abstract social nature is space. While managerial procedures within commodity production aim to maximize productivity per quantum of labor-time, the geo-managerial capacities of states and empires identify and seek to maximize unpaid work/energy per ‘unit’ of abstract nature. Historically, successive state–capital–science complexes co-produce Cheap Natures that are located, or reproduce themselves, largely outside the cash nexus. Geo-managerialism’s preliminary forms emerged rapidly during the rise of capitalism. Its chief historical expressions comprise those processes through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify and otherwise make natures legible to capital. A radical politics of sustainability must recognize – and seek to mobilize through – a tripartite division of work under capitalism: labor-power, unpaid human work and the work of nature as a whole.     

After servitude: bonded histories and the encumbrances of exchange in indigenizing Bolivia

Since 2006, Bolivia has undertaken a dramatic program of state reform aimed at overcoming the injustices of the nation’s colonial and neoliberal past. In the process, rural practices and sensibilities originating in the former hacienda system have assumed new importance, arising as volatile sites of state intervention and political critique. Like eighteenth-century Bourbon administrators, state reformers today express concern with agrarian patronage, which, they argue, facilitates continued land dispossession and reproduces a particularly servile Quechua-speaking peasantry. Yet, despite reform efforts, hacienda-based ties remain crucial to rural life, structuring acts of redistributive exchange and providing a relational medium by which former landlords attempt to make amends for past violence. By taking seriously the moral and political dimensions of post-hacienda patronage, this contribution challenges dominant frameworks of indigenous justice to foreground the reconciliatory possibilities of exchange relations rooted in a bonded past.     

The Greening of the Americas

ABSTRACT

This paper evaluates global capital’s ecological management and extends the assessment to the “green economy,” as developed in the first “green” neoliberal project, in Costa Rica. Costa Rica has been an important “laboratory” for experimentation in environmental governance mechanisms using debt-for-nature financial exchanges and other instruments of the Kyoto Protocol. I explore how “greening” can be understood as a new phase of capital accumulation, as I go into its five main aspects.     

Investigating Ministry Names for Comparative Policy Analysis: Lessons from Energy Governance

This commentary contends that ministry names offer a valuable construct for furthering the state of comparative policy analysis. Using energy governance as an example, this study shows that ministries’ names are stable in some countries but subject to changes in others. Furthermore, there is variation in the ministries’ names over time. Creating or maintaining a ministry that explicitly mentions “energy” is interpreted as signaling enhanced political attention to this issue, whereas removing the referral to “energy” signals the opposite. The names of ministries responsible for energy matters also affect energy policy outputs. Drawing on 43 OECD and BRICS countries, the empirical analysis shows that countries which have ministries in place that mention “energy” together with “economy” in their names are swifter in adopting renewable energy targets. Ministries that mention “economy” along with “climate” and/or “environment” also have an inclination to be faster in adopting such targets, but the coefficients fail to reach conventional levels of statistical significance. Given this finding, it appears worth pursuing this line of research further.