市场经济发展引起的法律价值观变化与行政法回应——从行政法制民主化和注重运用条理法的视角

经济体制改革的实质是走向经济民主化,中国市场经济发展引起法律价值观变化值得关注;在北京进行的典型调查表明,随着改革的深入,现代法律价值观正逐渐丰富;行政法制革新要积极回应法律价值观的变化,从行政法制的基本原则、行政立法、行政执法、行政司法、法律监督等方面推动民主化进程;在新形势下要深化改革、更新观念,还要注重认知和运用条理法,全面推进依法行政,加快建设法治政府。     

论世界专利

世界专利是专利制度发展的趋势.建立世界专利的客观条件已经基本具备:程序一体化对世界专利产生起着巨大的推动作用;地区性专利条约为世界专利提供了直接的样板;美国专利法改革为专利制度的统一消除了重要障碍;专利审查高速公路合作为单一审查打下了良好的实践基础;实体专利法条约取得进展.世界专利可能采取的模式包括PCT改进版模式、欧洲专利模式、统一生效加申请进入模式、单一世界专利模式等,它们各有特点.这四种模式也可以看作是世界专利的四个发展阶段.     

中国地方治理中的政府与社会协商困境分析——基于民主化宏观策略的思考

一个国家民主化的宏观策略体现了该国民主化的根本方向与核心原则。中国民主化的宏观策略是一种可管理导向的积极民主化策略,这种策略给中国地方治理中的政府与社会协商实践造成了种种主客观困境,使得地方政府不能很好地举办协商活动,社会力量也不能有效地参与。为走出困境,就必须在坚持审慎而务实策略的同时,不断克服怀疑主义,建立和健全保证协商有效性的管理机制。     

Books received

Since the early 2000s, the governments in ASEAN (the Association of South East Asian Nations) countries have developed ‘good agricultural practices’ (GAP) as public approaches to field-level quality assurance. Besides the primary goals of consumer food safety and quality assurance, these public GAP programs aim to support small-scale farmer inclusion in mainstream markets. This goal represents the antithesis of the prevailing trend that private GAP approaches have tightened integration with resourceful, large-scale producers in global value chains. This paper examines the compatibility of the goals of safety assurance and social justice in a public GAP approach through comparative analysis of Thailand's Q-GAP between two local contexts of fruit production and marketing. The research findings suggest that while the public GAP scheme could draw the participation of a broad cohort of local small-scale producers and serve to certify their production, its impact on changing producers' on-field practices and catalyzing their access to the global market through food safety assurance is limited. The binding factors include the lack of producers' understanding of the principles of the programme, limited additional economic merits for them, and the influence of extra-local market forces that stress economies of size and food quality rather than food safety.     

Ebola vaccines,evidentiary charisma and the rise of global health emergency research

Abstract

The 2013–2016 West African Ebola outbreak was both a catastrophic public health disaster and a rare research opportunity. This paper analyses how the tensions between the humanitarian imperatives of disease control and the epistemic conventions of bioscientific inquiry played out in the accelerated development, testing and licensure of Ebola vaccines. Beginning with the epidemiological projections of the disease’s spread, the paper develops the notion of evidentiary charisma to capture the power of experimental designs and data packages to marshal public health salience, recruit moral legitimacy and short-circuit scientific contestation. Attention to the charismatic dimensions of Ebola vaccine R&D helps to unpick the simultaneous appeals to exception and convention in the unfolding of a global health crisis, and to trace the normative and technical contours of the emerging paradigm of emergency research.     

On scale work: evidential practices and global health interventions

Abstract

Scalability can be understood as the ability to expand without changing. Yet, expanding an intervention to a global scale, we suggest, is a significant and difficult accomplishment. In this paper we propose to explore the kind of evidential exigencies that this accomplishment involves. To do so, we focus on the field of global health and examine how child immunization against the pneumococcus bacterium has been scaled up in low-income countries. The paper first attends to initial epidemiological scrutiny that revealed the existence of a large-scale public health problem and the possibility of an expandable solution (vaccination). It then describes the set-up of a funding arrangement using overseas aid to purchase vaccine doses manufactured by pharmaceutical companies, before paying attention to various frictions that affect the widespread use of pneumococcal vaccines. In these different moments through which scalability is accomplished, always partially and temporarily, we show that a dual activity can be witnessed, a pivoting between referential work and forward projection. To conclude, we suggest that scalability is more usefully approached as a form of expansion that is always attentive to the possibilities of change.     

Carbon sink geopolitics

Abstract

This paper explores an example of global politics in action by attending to the modalities and outcomes of United Nations negotiations on global warming. More precisely, the paper ethnographically traces how the capacity of tropical forests to act as carbon sinks is turned into a matter of global concern. The focus is on a negotiated policy called Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD+) and its anchoring in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose territory contains the second largest area of rainforest after Brazil. The paper discusses the importance of the promissory in climate actions, the multivalence of what is at stake and the porosity and resilience of national demarcation. To do so, it identifies three moments and sites of geopolitical re-composition: the formulation of international consensus, the work of preparatory agents and the quest for metrological inclusiveness. These moments and sites point to the theatricality and semi-secrecy of United Nations negotiations, the mobilizing activities of expatriate consultants hired with overseas aid funding and the unstable evidential grounds on which emission reduction efforts are based. The paper suggests that, through this series of processes, the carbon stored by tropical forests becomes a matter of global exigency.     

Past as global trade governance prelude: reconfiguring debate about reform of the multilateral trading system

This paper peers backwards into the history of the multilateral trading system and its development over the past half century as a means of considering what may lie beyond the horizon for the future of global trade governance. Its purpose is to underscore the necessity and urgency for root-and-branch reform of the multilateral trading system. It achieves this by comparing and contrasting the global trading system of 50 years ago with its modern-day equivalent and its likely future counterpart half-a-century hence. In so doing, the paper throws into sharp relief not only the inadequacies of global trade governance today but also the damaging consequences of not fundamentally reforming the system in the near future, with a particular emphasis on the past, present and future development of the world’s poorest and most marginalised countries.     

Transnational public goods provision: the increasing role of rising powers and the case of South Africa

The paper delineates three debates, which will be conflated. One line of discussion relates to public goods at a transnational level. Here, the referencing of debates regarding the characteristics of ‘a common good’ will be of significance. A second strand addresses the group of countries known as the ‘rising powers’ and the role these countries could play towards a globalised common good. A third discussion thread analyses South Africa as a case study for the main rising power on the African continent. By creating connections between the lines of discussion, this paper drives forward the debates on how the role of rising powers can be conceptually repositioned in the light of a changing global context, and explores how these countries can respond to global challenges.