Refine
Has Fulltext
- no (19)
Year of publication
- 2017 (19) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (19) (remove)
Language
- English (19)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (19)
Keywords
- Trumponomics (2)
- Aid conditionalities (1)
- Aid diplomacy (1)
- Aid-for-trade (1)
- Beijing consensus (1)
- Character (1)
- Cities and regions (1)
- Climate change (1)
- Climate governance experiments (1)
- De-globalisation Aid-not-trade (1)
- Development aid (1)
- Development aid criticism (1)
- Eastern Europe (1)
- Eurasian Economic Union (1)
- European Neighbourhood Policy (1)
- European Union (1)
- Formal organization (1)
- Functional differentiation (1)
- GHG Protocol (1)
- International Labour Organization (1)
- International climate negotiations (1)
- Luhmann (1)
- Mercantilism (1)
- Neoliberalism (1)
- Neoliberalism Populism theoretical framework (1)
- Nigeria (1)
- Niklas (1)
- Organization theory (1)
- Organizations and society (1)
- Partial organization (1)
- Philosophical perspectives (1)
- Political economy Socio-economic development (1)
- Politics of childhood (1)
- Populism (1)
- Populism restated (1)
- REDD (1)
- Russia (1)
- Simmel (1)
- Sociology of social facts (1)
- Transnational networks (1)
- UN-REDD (1)
- UNFCCC (1)
- Ukraine (1)
- Urban politics (1)
- Voluntary global business initiatives (1)
- Weber (1)
- authority (1)
- child asylum-seekers (1)
- climate change mitigation (1)
- conduct of life (1)
- contrastive empiricism (1)
- criticism of social psychology (1)
- democracy (1)
- empirical implications of theoretical models (1)
- family workers (1)
- flexibility (1)
- gendered boundaries (1)
- global climate governance (1)
- globalization (1)
- government formation (1)
- humanitarianism; (1)
- ideal types (1)
- identity (1)
- innocence (1)
- lifestyle (1)
- local government (1)
- moral sociology (1)
- personality (1)
- second chambers (1)
- sociology of social forms (1)
- stakeholder involvement concepts (1)
- statistical categorization (1)
- sustainability science (1)
- symbolic representation (1)
- theory testing (1)
- transnational governance arrangements (1)
- transnormative sociology (1)
- veto player theory (1)
- veto players (1)
- work (1)
Institute
- Sozialwissenschaften (19) (remove)
Despite the fact that development aid has broadened from economic growth theory to include human and social capital, there is a lack of a general agreement as to its benefits. This critical review and analyses of the development aid academic and institutional discourse identifies some major shortcomings. The dominance of economics at the expense of politics, and the imposition of development aid neoliberal conditionalities act as barriers to socio-economic development in aid recipient countries. An inference is offered to recast development aid through reconciliation within critical frameworks of different sides of the political spectrum.
Agricultural landscapes safeguard ecosystem services (ES) and biodiversity upon which human well-being depends. However, only a fraction of these services are generally considered in land management decisions, resulting in trade-offs and societally inefficient solutions. The TEEB Study (The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity) spearheaded the development of assessments of the economic significance of ES and biodiversity. Several national TEEB follow-ups have compiled case studies and derived targeted policy advice. By synthesizing insights from "Natural Capital Germany - TEEB DE" and focusing on rural areas, the objectives of this study were (i) to explore causes of the continued decline of ES and biodiversity, (ii) to introduce case studies exemplifying the economic significance of ES and biodiversity in land use decisions, and (iii) to synthesize key recommendations for policy, planning and management. Our findings indicate that the continued decrease of ES and biodiversity in Germany can be explained by implementation deficits within a well-established nature conservation system. Three case studies on grassland protection, the establishment of riverbank buffer zones and water-sensitive farming illustrate that an economic perspective can convey recognition of the values of ES and biodiversity. We conclude with suggestions for enhanced consideration, improved conservation and sustainable use of ES and biodiversity. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Becoming a Student of Reform
(2017)
Despite the proliferation and promise of subnational climate initiatives, the institutional architecture of transnational municipal networks (TMNs) is not well understood. With a view to close this research gap, the article empirically assesses the assumption that TMNs are a viable substitute for ambitious international action under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). It addresses the aggregate phenomenon in terms of geographical distribution, central players, mitigation ambition and monitoring provisions. Examining thirteen networks, it finds that membership in TMNs is skewed toward Europe and North America while countries from the Global South are underrepresented; that only a minority of networks commit to quantified emission reductions and that these are not more ambitious than Parties to the UNFCCC; and finally that the monitoring provisions are fairly limited. In sum, the article shows that transnational municipal networks are not (yet) the representative, ambitious and transparent player they are thought to be.
Dialogue. Divergence. Veiled Reception. Criticism: Georg Simmel’s
relationship with Emile Durkheim
(2017)
Simmel was the only German sociologist who directly cooperated with Durkheim. After an initial impression of convergence between the sociology of social facts and the sociology of social forms, a break between the two founders of sociology became inevitable. Yet, Durkheim and Simmel went on positioning themselves against one other in the years ahead. Durkheim’s allegation of ‘individual psychologism’ induced Simmel to a veiled reception of Durkheim’s methodological approach that permitted him to refine the sociological epistemology he eventually presented in the Soziologie published in 1908. On this basis, he was able to formulate a final criticism of the sociology of social facts as a social psychology.
Durkheim in Germany
(2017)
Feigning Democracy
(2017)
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation plus the sustainable management of forest and enhancement of carbon stocks (REDD+) is a global climate change mitigation initiative. The United Nations REDD Programme (UN-REDD) is training governments in developing countries, including Nigeria, to implement REDD+. To protect local people, UN-REDD has developed social safeguards including a commitment to strengthen local democracy to prevent an elite capture of REDD+ benefits. This study examines local participation and representation in the UN-REDD international policy board and in the national-level design process for the Nigeria-REDD proposal, to see if practices are congruent with the UN-REDD commitment to local democracy. It is based on research in Nigeria in 2012 and 2013, and finds that local representation in the UN-REDD policy board and in Nigeria-REDD is not substantive. Participation is merely symbolic. For example, elected local government authorities, who ostensibly represent rural people, are neither present in the UN-REDD board nor were they invited to the participatory forums that vetted the Nigeria-REDD. They were excluded because they were politically weak. However, UN-REDD approved the Nigeria-REDD proposal without a strategy to include or strengthen elected local governments. The study concludes with recommendations to help the UN-REDD strengthen elected local government authority in Nigeria in support of democratic local representation.
Are potential cabinets more likely to form when they control institutional veto players such as symmetric second chambers or minority vetoes? Existing evidence for a causal effect of veto control has been weak. This article presents evidence for this effect on the basis of conditional and mixed logit analyses of government formations in 21 parliamentary and semi-presidential democracies between 1955 and 2012. It also shows that the size of the effect varies systematically across political-institutional contexts. The estimated causal effect was greater in countries that eventually abolished the relevant veto institutions. It is suggested that the incidence of constitutional reform is a proxy for context-specific factors that increased the incentives for veto control and simultaneously provided a stimulus for the weakening of institutional veto power.
In a recent article in this journal, Ahrne, Brunsson, and Seidl (2016) suggest a definition of organization as a ‘decided social order’ composed of five elements (membership, rules, hierarchies, monitoring, and sanctions) which rest on decisions. ‘Partial organization’ uses only one or a few of these decidable elements while ‘complete organization’ uses them all. Such decided orders may also occur outside formal organizations, as the authors observe. Although we appreciate the idea of improving our understanding of organization(s) in modern society, we believe that Ahrne, Brunsson, and Seidl's suggestion jeopardizes the concept of organization by blurring its specific meaning. As the authors already draw on the work of Niklas Luhmann, we propose taking this exploration a step further and the potential of systems theory more seriously. Organizational analysis would then be able to retain a distinctive notion of formal organization on the one hand while benefiting from an encompassing theory of modern society on the other. With this extended conceptual framework, we would expect to gain a deeper understanding of how organizations implement and shape different societal realms as well as mediate between their particular logics, and, not least, how they are related to non-organizational social forms (e.g. families).