Comparing regulatory processes in genome editing and autonomous vehicles: How institutional environments shape sociotechnical imaginaries

This study compares the regulation of two emerging technologies, the CRISPR genome-editing system and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) in the United States. The study draws on 33 in-depth interviews with innovation and governance experts to study the relationship between their regulatory environments and developing beliefs about these technologies. Using sociotechnical imaginaries as a framework, we explore how social actors envision technologically driven futures and the social order that enables them. These imaginaries are essential to emerging technologies, where experts build a framework of potentialities for innovation still underway. While scholarship has documented how sociotechnical imaginaries arise among policymakers, groups of scientists, state and local stakeholders, and public actors in different countries, less has been said about how regulatory organizations and their actors shape expectations around technologies that are in the early and middle stages of development. This article finds that regulatory institutions shape emerging imaginaries along three related axes: the distribution of authority, technological novelty, and risk. Interviewees negotiate these three contingencies differently based on relevant extant regulatory structures and ideologies, resulting in distinct imaginaries around each technology. CRISPR actors envision genome editing as largely diminishing biomedical harm and eventually suitable for health markets, while CAV actors diverge on whether self-driving cars alleviate or exacerbate risk and how they may enter roads. That organizational structures and practices of regulation inform broadly held sociotechnical imaginaries bears significance for studies of innovation trajectories, suggesting regulators can take an active role in shaping how risks and benefits of emerging technology are defined.     

Support for the environment post-transition? Material concerns and policy tradeoffs

Though many individuals are aware of the need to address environmental concerns, fewer are willing to pay for climate action or think the environment should be a priority for government spending. One compelling reason is that they prioritize using scarce resources to address immediate material concerns. This is particularly likely for individuals facing absolute material scarcity or for those who think they are relatively economically worse off, especially in contexts characterized by rapid transformation and volatility in the levels and quality of social welfare provision. To test these expectations, we analyze survey data from formerly Communist economies, which today find themselves with vastly different fortunes. Empirical findings suggest that absolute and relative material scarcity affect opinions regarding government spending on, and the willingness to pay more for, environmental action. However, willingness to pay more for government public services, inclusive of anti-poverty initiatives, has an impact on willingness to pay more for climate action, but in counter-intuitive ways. Overall, the results appear to suggest that explicitly addressing and relating individual living standards and inequality with environmental concerns may expand support for climate action.     

Competition and cooperation in artificial intelligence standard setting: Explaining emergent patterns

Efforts to set standards for artificial intelligence (AI) reveal striking patterns: technical experts hailing from geopolitical rivals, such as the United States and China, readily collaborate on technical AI standards within transnational standard-setting organizations, whereas governments are much less willing to collaborate on global ethical AI standards within international organizations. Whether competition or cooperation prevails can be explained by three variables: the actors that make up the membership of the standard-setting organization, the issues on which the organization's standard-setting efforts focus, and the “games” actors play when trying to set standards within a particular type of organization. A preliminary empirical analysis provides support for the contention that actors, issues, and games affect the prospects for cooperation on global AI standards. It matters because shared standards are vital for achieving truly global frameworks for the governance of AI. Such global frameworks, in turn, lower transaction costs and the probability that the world will witness the emergence of AI systems that threaten human rights and fundamental freedoms.     

The times make a hero: Street-level policy entrepreneurship in major crisis responses in China

Street-level bureaucrats are often grassroots officials, and they are regarded as passive practitioners of policy with no authority to change policy or innovate, while policy entrepreneurs are usually high-level officials. Based on observations of China's responses to two national crises, this study found that the times do make a hero. When acting as innovative frontline technocrats, major transboundary crisis practitioners, and management savvy operators within the top-down bureaucracy, street-level bureaucrats can become policy entrepreneurs. To innovate and drive policy change, street-level policy entrepreneurs will adopt innovative strategies. They will make efficient use of their expertise and discretion, integrate various resources, strive for attention from superiors, consolidate their achievements, and expand their influence.     

Third-worldism: sensibility and ideology in Uruguay – from Third Position to the thought of Carlos Real de Azúa

This article examines the trajectory of the concepts ‘Third World’ and ‘Third-worldism’ in Uruguay, and attempts to prove that, although Third-worldism developed thoroughly as sensibility, it did not have the same success as ideology. The article examines authors and intellectual groups who reflected on the Third World, and especially on ‘tercerismo’ (Third Position) – understood as a set of ideas related to Third-worldism but not part of Third-worldism as such. It next explains the importance of the thought of Carlos Real de Azúa, identified as the main ideologist of Third-worldism in Uruguay. The research shows as a result that there was great concern about the Third World, especially in the 1960s and the 1970s, expressed in articles, reports and speeches, among others. Nevertheless, a full conceptualisation was never realised, except in the contribution made by Real de Azúa. The article concludes that, paradoxically, ‘tercerismo’ blocked the development of more elaborated third-worldist thought in Uruguay.     

The making of land ownership: land titling in rural Colombia – a reply to Hernando de Soto

Hernando de Soto’s best-selling book The Mystery of Capital argues that economically disadvantaged countries lack institutional arrangements that can spur economic development and capital growth. This article questions de Soto’s institutional economist account. It draws on a 14-month ethnographic study performed at two rural field sites in Colombia and in the central government office responsible for promoting land programmes designed to improve the living conditions of rural communities. This study, which focuses on the daily practices of public officials and rural campesinos, suggests the importance of the title document, and in particular the public deed, for land ownership. It describes the process by which landownership is created by the issuance of the land title document and highlights some important elements and untended consequences that are often neglected in this process of making land a legal and economic asset.     

Intermunicipal cooperation,municipal amalgamation and the price of credit

In many countries, local government size is increasingly thought to be insufficient to operate efficiently. Two possible solutions to this problem are amalgamation and intermunicipal cooperation. This paper applies a novel methodology to shed light on the efficiency implications of this choice. Using a unique and rich micro-level dataset, we find that intermunicipal organisations (IOs) in the Netherlands consistently pay higher interest rates than municipalities, while there is no economic reason to do so. We interpret this as a form of inefficiency. Municipal amalgamation, on the other hand, does not result in higher interest rates. Our analysis eliminates one possible explanation, dispersed ownership of IOs, as the number of partners cooperating in an IO does not affect interest rates (no ‘law of 1/n’). This leaves the introduction of extra hierarchical layers as a result of cooperation, and the ensuing reduction in monitoring, as the most probable explanation.     

Towards a Grotesque Phenomenology of Ethical Eroticism

Abstract: Over the course of this article, the author argues that ethics and the erotic are interrelated. The author also contends that the way subjectivities are constructed has a strong impact on the development of the ethical and the erotic character of these same subjectivities. Against this backdrop, the author postulates that envisioning or creating oneself as a grotesque subject promises to facilitate one's own development into a moral and erotic human being by triggering a process of inner estrangement that enables one to recognize the otherness within oneself. This analysis is based mainly on Mikhail Bakhtin's grotesque as presented in his Rabelais and His World (1965). This self-introspection serves as the basis for an ethical eroticism through which one shall transform oneself into a fully fledged moral and sensual subject. In formulating this argument, the author draws on Simone de Beauvoir's own attempt to link the erotic to the ethical. As will be seen, the same principle that stands at the heart of a phenomenological ethics also steers the author's phenomenological conception of the erotic. The principle in question is carnal intersubjectivity-bodies that penetrate one another and merge, yet never lose themselves in the other's carnality. Put differently, they remain non-objectified subjects. The grotesque subject is presented as a figuration that helps shed light on the way the subject has been conceived by, above all, phenomenological and postmodern theorists. The author then explores some of the ethical ramifications of this conceptualization. Drawing on these insights, the author fashions an ethical eroticism that derives from a grotesque subjectivity.     

社会保障法概念探析

本文通过对社会保障的概念与法的概念、社会保障的本质与法的本质、以及现有社会保障法的概念的全面分析 ,对社会保障法进行了重新定义。本文认为 ,社会保障法 (广义社会保障法 )是关于基于社会理性、为保证每一个人的生活安全、维持基本生活并保证生活质量从而保证其生存权和发展权而采取的社会互助行为的法律规范的总称 ,包括社会救济法、社会保险法和社会福利法三个次级法律规范群 ;狭义社会保障法是关于基于社会理性、为保证每一个人的生活安全、维持基本生活从而保证其生存权和发展权而采取的社会互助行为的法律规范的总称 ,包括社会救济法和社会保险法两个次级法律规范群。