Experimentalism in transnational forest governance: Implementing European Union Forest Law Enforcement,Governance and Trade (FLEGT) Voluntary Partnership Agreements in Indonesia and Ghana

Over the past decade, the European Union (EU) has created a novel experimentalist architecture for transnational forest governance: the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) initiative. This innovative architecture comprises extensive participation by civil society stakeholders in establishing and revising open‐ended framework goals (Voluntary Partnership Agreements [VPAs] with developing countries aimed at promoting sustainable forest governance and preventing illegal logging) and metrics for assessing progress toward them (legality standards and indicators) through monitoring and review of local implementation, underpinned by a penalty default mechanism to sanction non‐cooperation (the EU Timber Regulation that prohibits operators from placing illegally harvested wood on the European market). This paper analyzes the implementation of VPAs in Indonesia and Ghana, the two countries furthest advanced toward issuing FLEGT export licences. A central finding is the reciprocal relationship between the experimentalist architecture of the FLEGT initiative and transnational civil society activism, whereby the VPAs’ insistence on stakeholder participation, independent monitoring, and joint implementation review, underwritten by the EU, empowers domestic non‐governmental organizations with local knowledge to expose problems on the ground, hold public authorities accountable for addressing them, and contribute to developing provisional solutions.     

Measuring the impact of public perceptions on child welfare workers

The Public Perceptions of Child Welfare Scale measures how the social environment influences child welfare workers, including their job satisfaction and intent to leave. Psychometric studies have validated the scale for private child welfare workers, but there are no validation studies with public agency staff. This study fills that gap, showing stigma and respect are important constructs that also predict worker intent to leave. This research found an additional construct, blame, which was not present in private worker validation studies. The scale provides an important tool for the field as we continue to build evidence for effective recruitment and retention.     

Is experimentalist governance self-limiting or self-reinforcing? Strategic uncertainty and recursive rulemaking in European Union electricity regulation

Is experimentalist governance (XG) self-limiting or self-reinforcing by virtue of its relationship to strategic uncertainty as an essential scope condition? This article tackles this important but understudied question by elaborating a series of idealtypical pathways for the temporal evolution of XG in specific policy domains, ranging from reversion to hierarchical governance through endogenous reduction of strategic uncertainty at one extreme to institutionalization of experimentalism as a multipurpose governance architecture at the other. It then goes on to test the empirical validity of these contrasting theoretical expectations about the long-term relationship between XG and strategic uncertainty through a process-tracing analysis of electricity regulation in the European Union over a series of policy cycles since the 1990s. Building on and extending previous research in this domain, this article's findings strengthen empirical confidence in the theoretical expectation that XG is self-reinforcing, while diminishing confidence in the claim that it is self-limiting.     

Experimentalism in the EU: Common ground and persistent differences

Our central claim in this rejoinder is that experimentalist forms of organization in making regulatory rules, organizing social services, and articulating constitutional norms arise and diffuse as the problem that the actors and the state face shifts from ignorance to uncertainty. We argue that this has consequences for forms of accountability and for the conception and organization of democracy and constitutionalism. The EU, founded by diverse states in a period of continuing uncertainty, intensified by growing interdependence, proves to be a natural laboratory for observing urgent efforts to adjust to this new situation, and the symposium focuses on developments there. The symposium has brought us to see that there is more common ground in these debates than prior exchanges may have suggested. We therefore emphasize convergence on large points, while underscoring and, we hope, clarifying persistent differences, with the aim of encouraging the joint exploration of them already underway, in part explicitly, in part implicitly.     

Learning from Difference: The New Architecture of Experimentalist Governance in the EU

Abstract:  This article argues that current widespread characterisations of EU governance as multi-level and networked overlook the emergent architecture of the EU's public rule making. In this architecture, framework goals (such as full employment, social inclusion, 'good water status', a unified energy grid) and measures for gauging their achievement are established by joint action of the Member States and EU institutions. Lower-level units (such as national ministries or regulatory authorities and the actors with whom they collaborate) are given the freedom to advance these ends as they see fit. But in return for this autonomy, they must report regularly on their performance and participate in a peer review in which their results are compared with those pursuing other means to the same general ends. Finally, the framework goals, performance measures, and decision-making procedures themselves are periodically revised by the actors, including new participants whose views come to be seen as indispensable to full and fair deliberation. Although this architecture cannot be read off from either Treaty provisions or textbook accounts of the formal competences of EU institutions, the article traces its emergence and diffusion across a wide range of policy domains, including telecommunications, energy, drug authorisation, occupational health and safety, employment promotion, social inclusion, pensions, health care, environmental protection, food safety, maritime safety, financial services, competition policy, state aid, anti-discrimination policy and fundamental rights.     

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.     

Flexible specialization versus post-Fordism: theory,evidence and policy implications

There is widespread agreement that something dramatic has been happening to the international economy over the past two decades: rapid and radical changes in production technology and industrial organization, a major restructuring of world markets, and consequent large-scale changes in the policies of economic management at the internahonal, national and regional levels. At the same time there is a great deal of confusion about how to characterize these changes, the mechanisms at work, and the policy implications for different groups of economic and political actors. One way of accomplishing these tasks is to postulate a change of basic manufacturing organization from a ‘Fordist’ pattern that prevailed in the years of the long post-1945 boom to a ‘post-Fordist’ successor in the later 1970s and 1980s. Many people habitually conflate three approaches to industrial change under this heading: flexible specialization, regulation theory, and a more diverse body of explicitly ‘post-Fordiit’ analyses. The resulting problem is that significant differences of approach are concealed bv a suerficial similaritv between the proponents of flezble specialization and a sit of adparently similar bbt underlyingly divergent ideas. The purpose of this paper is to examine systematically the differences between flexible specialization, regulation theory, and other variants of ‘post-Fordism’ with respect to their fundamental assumptions and theoretical architecture, their methodological approach and use of evidence, and their policy implications.     

State,democracy, socialism: introduction

This paper argues that comtemporary developments in democratic politics mark the emergence of a new type of representative government. Current trends such as the weakening of party identification, the decline of political platforms or the increasing role of an élite of media experts may be regarded as undermining the principle of popular government. The paper demonstrates, however, that representative government was not invented as an indirect form of government by the people, but as a wholly original political system resting on principles different from those which organize democracy. Moreover, a number of institutional arrangements were established at the origins of representative government which have been virtually unquestioned since. Political representation has changed much less than is generally assumed. It is true, on the other hand, that the constant principles of representative government have had different consequences depending on the circumstance in which they were implemented. Such differences have generated various forms of political representation. The paper constructs three ideal-types of representative government. It shows that the current situation is best conceived as the rise of a new type of representation.