Investing in multi-stakeholder dialogue to address natural resource competition and conflict

How can multi-stakeholder dialogue help assess and address the roots of environmental resource competition and conflict? This article summarises the outcomes and lessons from action research in large lake systems in Uganda, Zambia, and Cambodia. Dialogues linking community groups, NGOs and government agencies have reduced local conflict, produced agreements with private investors, and influenced government priorities in ways that respond to the needs of marginalised fishing communities. The article details policy guidance in four areas: building stakeholder commitment, understanding the institutional and governance context, involving local groups in the policy reform process, and embracing adaptability in programme implementation.     

Changing knowledge and perceptions of African indigenous vegetables: the role of community-based nutritional outreach

African indigenous vegetables (AIVs) have potential to sustainably address malnutrition, a growing problem in sub-Saharan Africa. Their consumption is however, limited by poor perceptions and lack of awareness of nutritional benefits. There is limited evidence of the effectiveness of community-focused information dissemination approaches in influencing participants’ perceptions and uptake of innovations in AIVs to address malnutrition. This article aims to fill this knowledge gap, using a case study focusing on pastoral communities in Monduli district in northern Tanzania. Target communities participated in a community-based nutritional outreach facilitated by the Good Seed Initiative (GSI), held at Monduli district hospital in September 2014. The results provide evidence of the achievements of the GSI intervention, and the effectiveness of alternative information dissemination approaches.     

The Malian fertiliser value chain post-subsidy: an analysis of its structure and performance

This article examines the structure of the Malian fertiliser value chain and its performance in the context of the national subsidy programme, drawing on a review of the literature, farm household survey, and interviews with fertiliser suppliers. It finds that participants in the subsidy programme use more fertiliser and have significantly higher yields. The number of wholesalers and retailers has risen, but procurement remains concentrated. Poor fertiliser quality is a recurrent problem. The high cost of the programme raises questions regarding its sustainability. Mixed performance reflects the need for better monitoring and evaluation, and transparency in the programme.     

“Gendering” European security: policy changes,reform coalitions and opposition in the OSCE

The Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) has rarely been considered in scholarship on gender and security, even though it was one of the regional security organisations whose gender policy predated the United Nations Security Council’s call for more international attention to issues related to women, peace and security in October 2000. Based on an analysis of official OSCE documents and on semi-structured interviews, we trace the integration of gender issues in the OSCE and explore the rationale behind and the challenges associated with it. We identify two phases of gender policy change in the OSCE and show how the integration of UNSCR 1325 brought about an expansion of OSCE gender policy from an exclusive focus on “soft” security issues towards increased inclusion of gender in the area of “hard” security. Drawing on historical and feminist institutionalism, we argue that reform coalitions were crucial for the policy changes in the OSCE but that they encountered institutional and ideational barriers, which hampered implementation of the gender policy. In light of rising opposition, our analysis warns of a backlash that might jeopardise current achievements.     

Brexit: A Cliff Edge or a Small Bump in the Road?

It is becoming increasingly accepted, not least by the Prime Minister and opposition leadership, that the negotiation of a comprehensive trade relationship with the EU is necessary to prevent the UK economy falling off a ‘cliff edge’. This concern is shaping the UK's strategy towards negotiations with the EU and has provided at least part of the motivation for the UK to consider requesting a transition period to facilitate the Brexit process. But how accurate are these fears? What evidence is there for the existence of a ‘cliff edge’? How disastrous would it be for the UK to revert to trading with the EU on the same basis as most other countries in the world, namely according to World Trade Organisation rules? This article seeks to address these issues and it highlights a number of implications for policy makers which flow from understanding the available evidence a little more clearly.     

Neoliberalism,Nationalism and the Decline of Political Traditions

The three great Western political traditions (conservatism, liberalism, social democracy) incorporate three of the four possible combinations of the core political axes: traditional, unchanging authority versus the challenge of change, and egalitarianism versus inegalitarianism. The fourth possibility—egalitarian conservatism—has appeared in various guises, but has usually become submerged within the right, including its most authoritarian forms. Current xenophobic movements claiming to represent those suffering from excessive change—for example, those involved in the UK 's EU referendum and Donald Trump's victory in the USA —are seeing an apparent resurgence of this neglected tradition. What are its implications for politics in general?     

Public Services after Austerity: Zombies,Suez or Collaboration?

Public services—in the UK and elsewhere—are under considerable pressure, not just from austerity, but also from a variety of social, demographic and technological changes (in effect ‘austerity plus’). In this context, three broad options are open to policy‐makers: continue with tried‐and‐tested approaches while spending less money, which in the UK means a reliance on ‘New Public Management’ (NPM); withdraw completely from certain public services; or develop new approaches to public administration. We argue that all of these approaches have been attempted in recent years, but it is the final option that is most interesting and potentially the most beneficial. In this article, we examine experiments with these new approaches in responding to ‘austerity plus’. In particular, we examine various attempts at ‘collaboration’ in public services and discuss the risks associated with them. We conclude by setting out the extent to which policy‐makers have moved beyond NPM and suggesting some of the benefits that this could bring.     

Public support for coercive diplomacy: Exploring public opinion data from ten European countries

Scholarship has increasingly acknowledged the importance of public attitudes for shaping the European Union's Common Foreign and Security Policy. Economic sanctions emerged as one of CFSP's central tools. Yet despite the emergence of sanctions as a popular instrument in the EU foreign policy toolbox, public attitudes towards sanctions are yet to be studied in depth. This article explains public support for EU sanctions, using the empirical example of sanctions against Russia. It looks at geopolitical attitudes, economic motivations and ideational factors to explain the variation in public support for sanctions. The conclusion suggests that geopolitical factors are the most important, and that economic factors matter very little. Euroscepticism and anti‐Americanism play an important role in explaining the support for sanctions at the individual level.     

Innovation Agents in the Public Sector: Applying Champion and Promotor Theory to Explore Innovation in the Australian Public Service

Innovation is critical to organisational success and is a process steered, and potentially thwarted, by individuals. However, despite the importance of public sector innovation given the complexity of policy issues faced and the sector's specific contextual features, our understanding of innovation processes in government requires expansion. This study, using in‐depth case analyses of three Australian Public Service agencies, focuses on understanding the ‘human component’ of the innovation process by drawing on both innovation champion and promotor theories to explore, through the lens of organisational power, how multiple human agents progress public sector innovations. The results highlight the key, and often tandem, roles of individuals at multiple organisational levels who work to inspire and motivate others to progress an innovation (champions) and those with specific power bases who help overcome organisational barriers to innovation (promotors).     

The social semiotic of homophone phrase substitution in Chinese netizen discourse

The paper addresses an ingenious way by which Chinese netizens manage to reach their intended audiences under the radar of censors surveying the Internet in China. One specifically Chinese social use of language in this respect is the option to express criticism by using inoffensive characters that share the same or similar pronunciation with politically sensitive phrasing. We identify this type of expression as homophone phrase substitution (HPS). The device has been part of Chinese since ancient times under the name political metaphor. We address the main constraints at work in HPS, especially the role of voice (prosodic contour) that guides the construction of two divergent kinds of aboutness. Leaving aside its critical function in contemporary society, by contrasting HPS with verbal irony, metaphor, and Australian rhyming slang, and by drawing on semiologie and semiotics, indirect speech acts and implicit deixis, we suggest that this linguistic option throws new light on the semantic/pragmatic distinction.