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In Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic zielt Serene Khader auf eine Neuausrichtung der feministischen Perspektive, welche es schafft, dekolonial und anti-imperialistisch zu sein, ohne gleichzeitig dem Universalismus komplett abzuschwören. Die Motivation hinter dieser Neuorientierung ist die Einsicht, dass der liberale moralische Universalismus oftmals kulturelle Vorherrschaft und Imperialismus verstärkt. In diesem Kommentar wollen wir (a) uns mit der Frage beschäftigen, was genau unter Geschlechtergerechtigkeit verstanden werden soll und welcher Maßstab zur Beantwortung der Frage nach Gerechtigkeit angebracht ist und (b) einige Ideen zum Unterschied zwischen idealer und nicht-idealer Theorie liefern.
Potentially disabled?
(2022)
Ten years ago, I was diagnosed with a rare illness called Myasthenia Gravis. Myasthenia Gravis is a long-term neuromuscular autoimmune disease where antibodies block or destroy specific receptors at the junction between nerve and muscle; hence, nerve impulses fail to trigger muscle contractions. The disease leads to varying degrees of muscle weakness. Currently, I have only minor symptoms, I am not seriously impaired, and I do not suffer from any social disadvantage because of my illness. Yet, my life and my body since my diagnosis feel different than before. In this paper I aim to make this feeling intelligible and propose that it is a state of what I call ‘latent impairment’. Latent impairment is a state of being ‘in between’, different from being actually impaired and also different from being abled-bodied. The theory takes its cues both from social constructionist theories of disability as well as theories of (chronic) illness and their focus on the importance of subjectivity. Furthermore, I suggest that a phenomenological understanding of latent impairment can show possible ways of becoming an ally to the DRM.
The legitimacy and effectiveness of international organizations are often linked directly to issues of representation—not only on their high-level governing boards and in top leadership but also within their staff. This article explores two key questions of bureaucratic representation in the critical cases of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. First, we seek to unpack three essential dimensions of staff representation—nationality, education, and gender—to explain how representation may matter for international organizations. Second, we aim to describe the multiple dimensions of representation in the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank over the past twenty years by deploying a novel dataset on staff demographics, focusing on ranks with decision-making authority within the institutions. Our descriptive analysis reveals that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have made considerable efforts to diversify their bureaucracies. Nonetheless, representation remains uneven; for example, nationals from middle- and low-income countries, women, and staff without economics degrees from prominent US- or UK-based universities are less present in key leadership positions. These results may be well explained by the particular needs of the institutions’ technical mandates and limits in the supply of qualified staff and, as such, need not be seen as suboptimal. Nonetheless, perceived imbalances in representation may continue to pose external legitimation and operational challenges to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in a complex political environment where such multidimensional representation is important to sustaining the buy-in of donor and borrower countries alike. To this end, we recommend that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank enhance their diversity and inclusion efforts by increasing transparency via reporting disaggregated data on workforce composition and introducing annual requirements to publish progress reports with management feedback to strengthen internal and external accountability.
Die Debatte um epistemische Ungerechtigkeit verbindet normative Gerechtigkeitstheorien mit erkenntnistheoretischen Theorien und stellt somit die Art von wichtigen Fragen, die in den letzten Jahren sowohl innerhalb als auch außerhalb der Wissenschaft internationale Aufmerksamkeit erfahren haben. Verwiesen sei hier etwa auf soziale Bewegungen wie #MeToo und #BlackLivesMatter zeigen. Theorien der epistemischen Ungerechtigkeit (sowie verwandte Theorien wie Epistemologie des Unwissens, feministische Erkenntnistheorie und Standpunkttheorie) können sowohl epistemische Praktiken analysieren und einen Beitrag zu Gerechtigkeitstheorien und sozialer Epistemologie liefern, als auch zu adäquateren Verständnissen von existierenden Ungerechtigkeiten beitragen. In dem hier vorliegenden Schwerpunkt werden Beiträge zu eben solchen bislang wenig erforschten Ungerechtigkeiten sowie neue Diskussionsbeiträge zur Debatte um epistemische Ungerechtigkeiten geliefert.
Divided loyalties?
(2022)
Many operational International Organizations (IOs) rely on national staff when implementing projects in member states. However, fears persist that the loyalties of national IO staff may be divided when working in their home countries. The article studies differences in more than 50,000 procurement decisions taken in 1729 projects overseen by World Bank staff working as expatriates or in their home countries. The empirical results show that when staff work in their home countries, national suppliers' probability of winning procurement contracts increases. However, these increases are not driven by restricted procurement processes—that exclude competition—which are often seen as red flags for corruption. Instead, restricted procurement processes seem to be less likely when staff work in their home countries. These findings imply that national IO staff use their country-specific knowledge to increase the development effectiveness of procurement in line with the mandate of the World Bank.
Harmful side effects
(2022)
Governments have increasingly adopted laws restricting the activities of international non-governmental organizations INGOs within their borders. Such laws are often intended to curb the ability of critical INGOs to discover and communicate government failures and abuses to domestic and international audiences. They can also have the unintended effect of reducing the presence and activities of INGOs working on health issues, and depriving local health workers and organizations of access to resources, knowledge and other forms of support. This study assesses whether legislative restrictions on INGOs are associated with fewer health INGOs in a wide range of countries and with the ability of those countries to mitigate disability-adjusted life years lost because of twenty-one disease categories between 1993 and 2017. The findings indicate that restrictive legislation hampered efforts by civil society to lighten the global burden of disease and had adverse side effects on the health of citizens worldwide.
Greening global governance
(2022)
The last decades have seen a remarkable expansion in the number of International Organizations (IOs) that have mainstreamed environmental issues into their policy scope—in many cases due to the pressure of civil society. We hypothesize that International Non-Governmental Organizations (INGOs), whose headquarters are in proximity to the headquarters of IOs, are more likely to affect IOs' expansion into the environmental domain. We test this explanation by utilizing a novel dataset on the strength of environmental global civil society in proximity to the headquarters of 76 IOs between 1950 and 2017. Three findings stand out. First, the more environmental INGOs have their secretariat in proximity to the headquarter of an IO, the more likely the IO mainstreams environmental policy. Second, proximate INGOs’ contribution increases when they can rely on domestically focused NGOs in member states. Third, a pathway case reveals that proximate INGOs played an essential role in inside lobbying, outside lobbying and information provision during the campaign to mainstream environmental issues at the World Bank. However, their efforts relied to a substantial extent on the work of local NGOs on the ground.
The article explores whether and to what extent expert recommendations affect decision-making within the Security Council and its North Korea and Iran sanctions regimes. The article first develops a rationalist theoretical argument to show why making many second-stage decisions, such as determining lists of items under export restrictions, subjects Security Council members to repeating coordination situations. Expert recommendations may provide focal point solutions to coordination problems, even when interests diverge and preferences remain stable. Empirically, the article first explores whether expert recommendations affected decision-making on commodity sanctions imposed on North Korea. Council members heavily relied on recommended export trigger lists as focal points, solving a divisive conflict among great powers. Second, the article explores whether expert recommendations affected the designation of sanctions violators in the Iran sanctions regime. Council members designated individuals and entities following expert recommendations as focal points, despite conflicting interests among great powers. The article concludes that expert recommendations are an additional means of influence in Security Council decision-making and seem relevant for second-stage decision-making among great powers in other international organisations.
Major international organizations (IOs) are heavily contested, but they are rarely dissolved. Scholars have focused on their longevity, making institutional arguments about replacement costs and institutional assets as well as IO agency to adapt and resist challenges. This article analyzes the limits of institutional stickiness by focusing on outlier cases. While major IOs are dissolved at considerably lower rates than minor IOs, the article nevertheless identifies twenty-one cases where major IOs have died since 1815. These are tough cases as they do not conform to our institutionalist expectations. To better understand these rare but important events, the article provides case illustrations from the League of Nations and International Refugee Organization, which were dissolved due to their perceived underperformance and a disappearing demand for cooperation. These cases show the limits of the institutional theories of IO stickiness: sometimes member states find high replacement costs justified or consider assets as sunk costs, and IOs may lack agency to strategically respond. This article refines theories of institutional stickiness and contributes to the institutional theory of the life and death of IOs.
Les principales organisations internationales (OI) sont fortement contestées, mais rarement dissoutes. Pour expliquer leur longévité, les chercheurs ont avancé des arguments institutionnels concernant les coûts de remplacement et les actifs de l'institution, mais aussi la capacité des OI à s'adapter et à résister aux défis. Cet article analyse les limites de la persistance des institutions en se concentrant sur des cas particuliers. Tandis que les principales OI sont dissoutes bien moins fréquemment que des OI moins importantes, cet article identifie néanmoins 21 cas de disparition d'OI principales depuis 1815. Ces derniers sont particulièrement difficiles, car ils ne correspondent pas à nos attentes en termes d'institutions. Afin de mieux comprendre ces événements rares, mais non moins importants, l'article propose comme illustrations de cas la Société des Nations et l'Organisation internationale pour les réfugiés, qui ont été dissoutes à cause de leur manque apparent de résultats et de la disparition de la demande de coopération. Ces cas mettent en évidence les limites des théories institutionnelles de persistance des OI : parfois, les États membres considèrent les coûts de remplacement élevés justifiés ou les actifs comme des coûts irrécupérables, et les OI n'ont peut-être pas la capacité de leur répondre de manière stratégique. Le présent article affine les théories de persistance institutionnelle et contribue à la théorie institutionnelle de vie et de mort des OI.
Las organizaciones internacionales (OI) más importantes son muy cuestionadas, pero rara vez se disuelven. Los investigadores se han centrado en la longevidad de las IO, formulando argumentos institucionales sobre los costes de sustitución y los activos institucionales, así como sobre la capacidad de adaptación y resistencia de las organizaciones internacionales. Este artículo analiza los límites de la rigidez institucional centrándose en casos atípicos. Aunque las OI más importantes se disuelven en proporciones considerablemente menores que las OI de menor importancia, el artículo identifica 21 casos en los que OI más importantes desaparecieron desde 1815. Se trata de casos difíciles, ya que no se ajustan a nuestras expectativas institucionalistas. Para comprender mejor estos raros pero importantes acontecimientos, el artículo ofrece ejemplos de casos de la Sociedad de Naciones y de la, Organización Internacional para los Refugiados que se disolvieron debido a su bajo desempeño percibido y a la desaparición de la demanda de cooperación. Estos casos muestran los límites de las teorías institucionales sobre la rigidez de las OI: En ocasiones, los Estados miembros consideran justificados los elevados costes de sustitución o consideran que los activos son costes irrecuperables, y las OI pueden no disponer de capacidad de respuesta estratégica. Este artículo profundiza en las teorías de la rigidez institucional y contribuye a la teoría institucional de la vida y la muerte de las organizaciones internacionales.
AUKUS und die strukturellen Veränderungen der sicherheitspolitischen Lage im indo-pazifischen Raum
(2022)
Krisenvorstellungen
(2022)
Der Beitrag stellt zentrale Ergebnisse der qualitativen Untersuchung zum Thema „Gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen im sozialen und im schulischen Raum“ dar. Dabei wird zunächst nur der erste Teil und damit das Erfahrungswissen im sozialen Raum beleuchtet. Neben einer kurzen Darstellung des theoretischen und methodischen Zugangs werden unterschiedliche Krisenverständnisse von Lehrer/-innen herausgestellt und auf sozialwissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse zurückgeführt. Der Rekurs auf die Krise(n) wird als Zugang genutzt, um gesellschaftliche He-rausforderungen zu identifizieren und Einschätzungen zu explizieren. In einem zweiten Schritt werden zwei Typen präsentiert, durch die exemplarisch konträre Vorstellungen zu unterschiedlichen gesellschaftlichen Herausforderungen und Krisen herausgestellt werden können. Durch die zwei Typen „progressive“ und „konservative Kritiker/-innen“ kann ein Spannungsfeld aufgemacht werden, auf dem die untersuchten Fälle verortet werden. Ziel ist es, Erfahrungswissen und die gesellschaftlichen Sichtweisen wie auch politischen Überzeugungen sichtbar und vergleichbar werden zu lassen. Diese bilden die Grundlage, um anschließend zu untersuchen, wie sich Vorstellungen und Überzeugungen auch im schulischen Raum wiederfinden lassen. Ein erster Einblick wird am Ende des Beitrags durch die Darstellung eines exemplarischen Falls gewährt.
Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) offers flexible and decarbonized power generation and is one of the few dispatchable renewable technologies able to generate renewable electricity on demand. Today (2018) CSP contributes only 5TWh to the European power generation, but it has the potential to become one of the key pillars for European decarbonization pathways. In this paper we investigate how factors and pivotal policy decisions leading to different futures and associated CSP deployment in Europe in the years up to 2050. In a second step we characterize the scenarios with their associated system cost and the costs of support policies. We show that the role of CSP in Europe critically depends on political developments and the success or failure of policies outside renewable power. In particular, the uptake of CSP depends on the overall decarbonization ambition, the degree of cross border trade of renewable electricity and is enabled by the presence of strong grid interconnection between Southern and Norther European Member States as well as by future electricity demand growth. The presence of other baseload technologies, prominently nuclear power in France, reduce the role and need for CSP. Assuming favorable technological development, we find a strong role for CSP in Europe in all modeled scenarios: contributing between 100TWh to 300TWh of electricity to a future European power system. This would require increasing the current European CSP fleet by a factor of 20 to 60 in the next 30 years. To achieve this financial support between € 0.4-2 billion per year into CSP would be needed, representing only a small share of overall support needs for power-system transformation. Cooperation of Member States could further help to reduce this cost.
Chinese CSP for the world?
(2022)
For three consecutive five-year plans since 2006, China has worked on building up an internationally competitive CSP industry and value chain. One big milestone in commercializing proprietary Chinese CSP technology was the 2016 demonstration program of 20 commercial-scale projects. China sought to increase and demonstrate capacities for domestic CSP technology development and deployment. At the end of the 13th five-year period, we take stock of the demonstrated progress of the Chinese CSP industry towards delivering internationally competitive CSP projects. We find that in January 2021, eight commercial-scale projects, in total 500 MW, have been completed and three others were under construction in China. In addition, Chinese EPC’s have participated in three international CSP projects, although proprietary Chinese CSP designs have not been applied outside China. The largest progress has been made in molten-salt tower technology, with several projects by different companies completed and operating successfully: here, the aims were met, and Chinese companies are now at the global forefront of this segment. Further efforts for large-scale demonstration are needed, however, for other CSP technologies, including parabolic trough - with additional demonstration hindered by a lack of further deployment policies. In the near future, Chinese companies seek to employ the demonstrated capabilities in the tower segment abroad and are developing projects using Chinese technology, financing, and components in several overseas markets. If successful, this will likely lead to increasing competition and further cost reductions for the global CSP sector.
Energy models are used to inform and support decisions within the transition to climate neutrality. In recent years, such models have been criticised for being overly techno-centred and ignoring environmental and social factors of the energy transition. Here, we explore and illustrate the impact of ignoring such factors by comparing model results to model user needs and real-world observations. We firstly identify concrete user needs for better representation of environmental and social factors in energy modelling via interviews, a survey and a workshop. Secondly, we explore and illustrate the effects of omitting non-techno-economic factors in modelling by contrasting policy-targeted scenarios with reality in four EU case study examples. We show that by neglecting environmental and social factors, models risk generating overly optimistic and potentially misleading results, for example by suggesting transition speeds far exceeding any speeds observed, or pathways facing hard-to-overcome resource constraints. As such, modelled energy transition pathways that ignore such factors may be neither desirable nor feasible from an environmental and social perspective, and scenarios may be irrelevant in practice. Finally, we discuss a sample of recent energy modelling innovations and call for continued and increased efforts for improved approaches that better represent environmental and social factors in energy modelling and increase the relevance of energy models for informing policymaking.
The rapid uptake of renewable energy technologies in recent decades has increased the demand of energy researchers, policymakers and energy planners for reliable data on the spatial distribution of their costs and potentials. For onshore wind energy this has resulted in an active research field devoted to analysing these resources for regions, countries or globally. A particular thread of this research attempts to go beyond purely technical or spatial restrictions and determine the realistic, feasible or actual potential for wind energy. Motivated by these developments, this paper reviews methods and assumptions for analysing geographical, technical, economic and, finally, feasible onshore wind potentials. We address each of these potentials in turn, including aspects related to land eligibility criteria, energy meteorology, and technical developments of wind turbine characteristics such as power density, specific rotor power and spacing aspects. Economic aspects of potential assessments are central to future deployment and are discussed on a turbine and system level covering levelized costs depending on locations, and the system integration costs which are often overlooked in such analyses. Non-technical approaches include scenicness assessments of the landscape, constraints due to regulation or public opposition, expert and stakeholder workshops, willingness to pay/accept elicitations and socioeconomic cost-benefit studies. For each of these different potential estimations, the state of the art is critically discussed, with an attempt to derive best practice recommendations and highlight avenues for future research.
Beyond technology
(2022)
This article enriches the existing literature on the importance and role of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) in renewable energy sources research by providing a novel approach to instigating the future research agenda in this field. Employing a series of in-depth interviews, deliberative focus group workshops and a systematic horizon scanning process, which utilised the expert knowledge of 85 researchers from the field with diverse disciplinary backgrounds and expertise, the paper develops a set of 100 priority questions for future research within SSH scholarship on renewable energy sources. These questions were aggregated into four main directions: (i) deep transformations and connections to the broader economic system (i.e. radical ways of (re)arranging socio-technical, political and economic relations), (ii) cultural and geographical diversity (i.e. contextual cultural, historical, political and socio-economic factors influencing citizen support for energy transitions), (iii) complexifying energy governance (i.e. understanding energy systems from a systems dynamics perspective) and (iv) shifting from instrumental acceptance to value-based objectives (i.e. public support for energy transitions as a normative notion linked to trust-building and citizen engagement). While this agenda is not intended to be—and cannot be—exhaustive or exclusive, we argue that it advances the understanding of SSH research on renewable energy sources and may have important value in the prioritisation of SSH themes needed to enrich dialogues between policymakers, funding institutions and researchers. SSH scholarship should not be treated as instrumental to other research on renewable energy but as intrinsic and of the same hierarchical importance.
The European Union’s 2030 climate and energy package introduced fundamental changes compared to its 2020 predecessor. These changes included a stronger focus on the internal market and an increased emphasis on technology-neutral decarbonization while simultaneously de-emphasizing the renewables target. This article investigates whether changes in domestic policy strategies of leading member states in European climate policy preceded the observed changes in EU policy. Disaggregating strategic change into changes in different elements (goals, objectives, instrumental logic), allows us to go beyond analyzing the relative prioritization of different goals, and to analyze how policy requirements for reaching those goals were dynamically redefined over time. To this end, we introduce a new method, which based on insights from social network analysis, enables us to systematically trace those strategic chances. We find that shifts in national strategies of the investigated member states preceded the shift in EU policy. In particular, countries reframed their understanding of supply security, and pushed for the internal electricity market also as a security measure to balance fluctuating renewables. Hence, the increasing focus on markets and market integration in the European 2030 package echoed the increasingly central role of the internal market for electricity supply security in national strategies. These findings also highlight that countries dynamically redefined their goals relative to the different phases of the energy transition.
There are considerable differences in the pace and underlying motivations of the energy transition in the different geographical contexts across Europe. The European Union's commitment to climate neutrality by 2050 requires a better understanding of the energy transition in different contexts and scales to improve cooperation of involved actors. In this article, we identify critical issues and challenges of the European energy transition as perceived by stakeholders and investigate how these perceptions vary across geographical contexts. To do so, we couple a policy document analysis with research based on stakeholder engagement activities in three different scales, national (Greece), regional (Nordic Region) and continental scale (European Union). Our findings show that stakeholder perspectives on the energy transition depend on contextual factors underlying the need for policies sensitive to the different transition issues and challenges in European regions. They also reveal cross-cutting issues and challenges among the three case studies, which could lead to further improvement of the cross-country collaboration to foster the European energy transition.
To achieve the European Union's target for climate neutrality by 2050 reduced energy demand will make the transition process faster and cheaper. The role of policies that support energy efficiency measures and demand-side management practices will be critical and to ensure that energy demand models are relevant to policymakers and other end-users, understanding how to further improve the models and whether they are tailored to user needs to support efficient decision-making processes is crucial. So far though, no scientific studies have examined the key user needs for energy demand modelling in the context of the climate neutrality targets. In this article we address this gap using a multi-method approach based on empirical and desk research. Through survey and stakeholder meetings and workshops we identify user needs of different stakeholder groups, and we highlight the direction in which energy demand models need to be improved to be relevant to their users. Through a detailed review of existing energy demand models, we provide a full understanding of the key characteristics and capabilities of existing tools, and we identify their limitations and gaps. Our findings show that classical demand-related questions remain important to model users, while most of the existing models can answer these questions. Furthermore, we show that some of the user needs related to sectoral demand modelling, dictated by the latest policy developments, are under-researched and are not addressed by existing tools.