Pursuits of adaptiveness in the shared rivers of Monsoon Asia

How water should be managed in Monsoon Asia is emerging as one of the core earth system governance challenges. In this article, we explore the politics around pursuits of adaptiveness in water management, emphasizing the major transboundary river basins draining the south and eastern Himalayas. We look at two main functions: storing, diverting and sharing water for periods of scarcity; protecting people and places from destructive floods. We find that the pursuit of adaptiveness will take place partly outside the range of human experience in a context of large differences in exposure and vulnerabilities, disparate interests and unequal power. Anticipatory policies and actions to adapt and improve adaptive capacity to the transboundary impacts of changes in water-use, land-use and climate on water resources and services are still in their infancy; but several problem-framing discourses are emerging that have longer-term implications for water governance. It is not yet clear how these competing policy-frames will evolve in Asia. Much will depend on how systems of water governance develop. Public scrutiny of how governments in Asia plan to adapt to climate change in the water sector—on how risks of not enough and too much water are dealt with—will need to continue to help sort out those projects and strategies which are driven primarily by political benefits from those which actually contribute to building adaptive capacities and maintaining social-ecological resilience.     

Earth system governance: a research framework

The Earth System Science Partnership, which unites all major global change research programmes, declared in 2001 an urgent need to develop “strategies for Earth System management”. Yet what such strategies might be, how they could be developed, and how effective, efficient and equitable such strategies would be, remains unspecified. It is apparent that the institutions, organizations and mechanisms by which humans currently govern their relationship with the natural environment and global biochemical systems are not only insufficient—they are also poorly understood. This article presents the science programme of the Earth System Governance Project, a new 10-year global research effort endorsed by the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP). It outlines the concept of earth system governance as a challenge for the social sciences, and it elaborates on the interlinked analytical problems and research questions of earth system governance as an object of study. These analytical problems concern the overall architecture of earth system governance, agency beyond the state and of the state, the adaptiveness of governance mechanisms and processes as well as their accountability and legitimacy, and modes of allocation and access in earth system governance. The article also outlines four crosscutting research themes that are crucial for the study of each analytical problem as well as for the integrated understanding of earth system governance: the role of power, knowledge, norms and scale.     

Access and allocation in earth system governance: lessons learnt in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - Researching socio-ecological justice issues in earth system governance can be operationalized through an Access (securing...     

Pygmalion in the reintegration process: Desistance from crime through the looking glass

The study of desistance from crime has come of age in recent years, and there are now several, competing theories to account for the ability of long-term offenders to abstain from criminal behavior. Most prominently, recent explanations have borrowed elements from informal social control theory, differential association theory and cognitive psychology. In the following, we argue that labeling theory may be a neglected factor in understanding the desistance process. Drawing on interview data collected as part of a study of an offender reintegration program, we illustrate how the idea of the “looking-glass self-concept” and others is a useful metaphor in understanding the process of rehabilitation or recovery in treatment programs.     

Access and allocation in earth system governance: water and climate change compared

A significant percentage of the global population does not yet have access to safe drinking water, sufficient food or energy to live in dignity. There is a continuous struggle to allocate the earth’s resources among users and uses. This article argues that distributional problems have two faces: access to basic resources or ecospace; and, the allocation of environmental resources, risks, burdens, and responsibilities for causing problems. Furthermore, addressing problems of access and allocation often requires access to social processes (science, movements and law). Analysts, however, have tended to take a narrow, disciplinary approach although an integrated conceptual approach may yield better answers. This article proposes a multi-disciplinary perspective to the problem of access and allocation and illustrates its application to water management and climate change.     

Editorial Access and Allocation in Earth System Governance

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics -     

‘Exempted soldiers’ in the ‘New Sensitivity Military’: public opinion among Jewish Israelis concerning selective conscientious objection (military refusal) and the Military Recruitment Model

In recent decades (the ?post-heroic‘ condition) - threats of widespread selective conscientious objection have become a political tool to advance opposing political agendas in Israel. This article examines attitudes amongst the Israeli public concerning the legitimacy of demands that different groups of soldiers be exempted from military operations to which they are ideologically opposed (such as serving in the occupied territories or, conversely, participating in evacuation of settlements). The results point to a multi-cultural model embracing diversity management not as a neo-liberal ideal but rather as a strategy for co-option, containment and inclusion, with a view to preserving the “people's army” model.     

Les sociétés d‘État au Québec: un outil indispensable

Sommaire: Depuis quelques années, l'intervention de l'État connaît une progression phénoménale sous diverses formes, l'une étant la création de sociétés d'État. Quoiqu'on remette souvent leur existence en question ou encore qu'on les critique, leurs agissements n'en ont pas moins été justifiés à plus d'une occasion. L'auteur, lui-même à la tête d'une des plus importantes sociêtês d'État canadiennes, donne son point de vue sur le rôle économique des sociétés d'État à vocation industrielle et commerciale ainsi que sur leur contribution au développement éonomique du Québec. Il retrace d'abord la raison d'être des sociétés d'État, propose certains éléments du bilan général qu'on pourrait en dresser et formule les limites et les conditions de leur utilisation efficace. Confirmant le rde fondamental des sociétés d'État à vocation industrielle et commerciale, surtout dans le contexte économique québécois, l'auteur précise que celles-ci ont contribuéàélargir la base industrielle du Québec, à l'enrichir d'un savoir-faire important en matière financière, industrielle, commerciale et technique, à développer son potentiel économique et à offrir des occasions de carrière dans la grande entreprise. Il conclut enfin qu'une meilleure performance économique repose sur la concentration et la concertation. Il importe peu, selon lui, que les groupes industriels, financiers et commerciaux soient publics, privés ou mixtes; l'important, c'est qu'il y ait des groupes puissants. Abstract: For some years now, government intervention has increased tremendously in various forms, one of which is the creation of crown corporations. Although we have often criticized crown corporations or questioned their very existence, nevertheless their actions have been justifiable on more than one occasion. The writer, who is himself at the head of one of the largest crown corporations in Canada, expresses his opinion on the economic role played by commercial and industrial oriented crown corporations, and on their contribution to the economic development of Quebec. He goes back over the raison d'être of crown corporations, and puts forward ideas for an eventual general assessment. He also speaks of their limitations, and the conditions necessary for their effective use. While reiterating the essential role of industrial and commercial oriented crown corporations, especially within the economic context of Quebec, the writer highlighted their contribution towards broadening Quebec's industrial base, and enriching the province with their considerable financial, industrial, commercal and technical expertise. They also offer career opportunities with large companies and are active in the development of the province's economic potential. Finally, the writer concludes that improved economic results depend on concentration and concertntion. He considers that it is of little importance whether industrial, financial and commercial groups are public, private or mixed; what counts is how powerful they are.     

Nobody Knows Best: Alternative Perspectives on Forest Management and Governance in Southeast Asia

In this paper we propose a framework for understanding how dominant perspectives, or worldviews, influence the crafting of institutions, and how these, in turn, constrain the functions and goals of knowledge systems. Alternative perspectives carry their own set of assumptions and beliefs about who should be making the rules, where the best knowledge lies to guide decisions, and about where more knowledge is needed. Initially, four contrasting perspectives are elaborated: state-, market-, greens-, and locals-know-best. We illustrate the framework by exploring the recent history of forest governance in Southeast Asia, finding several examples of battles of perspectives leading to a new dominant perspective. In each case the dominant perspective itself, old or new, is shown to be defective in some critical way and was, or should be, replaced. The problem is that each of the perspectives considers the world as knowable, manageable, and relatively constant, or at most changing only slowly. Ecological and socio-political crises, however, are recurrent. Management plans and regulations or policies that aim to establish the land-use allocation, the best crop, the best forest management system or the best price or system of incentives, are doomed to failure. If uncertainties are accepted as fundamental, solutions as temporary, and scientific knowledge as useful but limited, then Nobody Knows Best is a modest, but effective heuristic for forest governance.     

The role of social learning in adaptiveness: insights from water management

The article introduces the notion of adaptiveness and discusses the role of social learning in it. Adaptiveness refers to the capacity of a social actor or social–ecological system to adapt in response to, or in anticipation of, changes in the environment. We explore arguments both from a theoretical perspective and through illustrations from case studies of water management in the Alps of Europe and Mekong in southeast Asia. We propose and illustrate that social learning processes are important for building adaptiveness in several ways and at different scales. Social learning can help cope with informational uncertainty; reduce normative uncertainty; build consensus on criteria for monitoring and evaluation; empower stakeholders to take adaptive actions; reduce conflicts and identify synergies between adaptations; and improve fairness of decisions and actions. Findings in the case studies provide some support for these generalizations but often with caveats related to diversity of stakeholder interests, levels of shared understanding versus contested knowledge and scale of coordination. For this reason, we suggest that future work pays greater attention to issues of agency, knowledge and scale: What strategies have individuals and organizations pursued in successful examples of social learning? How are the boundaries and interactions between science, policy and practice managed? How does social learning occur across spatial and temporal scales?