320 Politikwissenschaft
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Verdun 1916
(2016)
In 2002 Germany adopted an ambitious national sustainability strategy, covering all three sustainability spheres and circling around 21 key indicators. The strategy stands out because of its relative stability over five consecutive government constellations, its high status and increasingly coercive nature. This article analyses the strategy's role in the policy process, focusing on the use and influence of indicators as a central steering tool. Contrasting rationalist and constructivist perspectives on the role of knowledge in policy, two factors, namely the level of consensus about policy goals and the institutional setting of the indicators, are found to explain differences in use and influence both across indicators and over time. Moreover, the study argues that the indicators have been part of a continuous process of ‘structuring’ in which conceptual and instrumental use together help structure the sustainability challenge in such a way that it becomes more manageable for government policy.
In the debate on how to govern sustainable development, a central question concerns the interaction between knowledge about sustainability and policy developments. The discourse on what constitutes sustainable development conflict on some of the most basic issues, including the proper definitions, instruments and indicators of what should be ‘developed’ or ‘sustained’. Whereas earlier research on the role of (scientific) knowledge in policy adopted a rationalist-positivist view of knowledge as the basis for ‘evidence-based policy making’, recent literature on knowledge creation and transfer processes has instead pointed towards aspects of knowledge-policy ‘co-production’ (Jasanoff 2004). It is highlighted that knowledge utilisation is not just a matter of the quality of the knowledge as such, but a question of which knowledge fits with the institutional context and dominant power structures. Just as knowledge supports and justifies certain policy, policy can produce and stabilise certain knowledge. Moreover, rather than viewing knowledge-policy interaction as a linear and uni-directional model, this conceptualization is based on an assumption of the policy process as being more anarchic and unpredictable, something Cohen, March and Olsen (1972) has famously termed the ‘garbage-can model’.
The present dissertation focuses on the interplay between knowledge and policy in sustainability governance. It takes stock with the practice of ‘Management by Objectives and Results’ (MBOR: Lundqvist 2004) whereby policy actors define sustainable development goals (based on certain knowledge) and are expected to let these definitions guide policy developments as well as evaluate whether sustainability improves or not. As such a knowledge-policy instrument, Sustainability Indicators (SI:s) help both (subjectively) construct ‘social meaning’ about sustainability and (objectively) influence policy and measure its success. The different articles in this cumulative dissertation analyse the development, implementation and policy support (personal and institutional) of Sustainability Indicators as an instrument for MBOR in a variety of settings. More specifically, the articles centre on the question of how sustainability definitions and measurement tools on the one hand (knowledge) and policy instruments and political power structures on the other, are co-produced.
A first article examines the normative foundations of popular international SI:s and country rankings. Combining theoretical (constructivist) analysis with factor analysis, it analyses how the input variable structure of SI:s are related to different sustainability paradigms, producing a different output in terms of which countries (developed versus developing) are most highly ranked. Such a theoretical input-output analysis points towards a potential problem of SI:s becoming a sort of ‘circular argumentation constructs’. The article thus, highlights on a quantitative basis what others have noted qualitatively – that different definitions and interpretations of sustainability influence indicator output to the point of contradiction. The normative aspects of SI:s does thereby not merely concern the question of which indicators to use for what purposes, but also the more fundamental question of how normative and political bias are intrinsically a part of the measurement instrument as such. The study argues that, although no indicator can be expected to tell the sustainability ‘truth-out-there’, a theoretical localization of indicators – and of the input variable structure – may help facilitate interpretation of SI output and the choice of which indicators to use for what (policy or academic) purpose.
A second article examines the co-production of knowledge and policy in German sustainability governance. It focuses on the German sustainability strategy ‘Perspektiven für Deutschland’ (2002), a strategy that stands out both in an international comparison of national sustainability strategies as well as among German government policy strategies because of its relative stability over five consecutive government constellations, its rather high status and increasingly coercive nature. The study analyses what impact the sustainability strategy has had on the policy process between 2002 and 2015, in terms of defining problems and shaping policy processes. Contrasting rationalist and constructivist perspectives on the role of knowledge in policy, two factors, namely the level of (scientific and political) consensus about policy goals and the ‘contextual fit’ of problem definitions, are found to be main factors explaining how different aspects of the strategy is used. Moreover, the study argues that SI:s are part of a continuous process of ‘structuring’ in which indicator, user and context factors together help structure the sustainability challenge in such a way that it becomes more manageable for government policy.
A third article examines how 31 European countries have built supportive institutions of MBOR between 1992 and 2012. In particular during the 1990s and early 2000s much hope was put into the institutionalisation of Environmental Policy Integration (EPI) as a way to overcome sectoral thinking in sustainability policy making and integrate issues of environmental sustainability into all government policy. However, despite high political backing (FN, EU, OECD), implementation of EPI seems to differ widely among countries. The study is a quantitative longitudinal cross-country comparison of how countries’ ‘EPI architectures’ have developed over time. Moreover, it asks which ‘EPI architectures’ seem to be more effective in producing more ‘stringent’ sustainability policy.
This chapter takes stock with the research on the authority of international organizations (IOs) and international public administrations (IPAs) in the fields of International Relations (IR) and Public Administration (PA). It combines arguments from conceptual and theoretical debates with empirical findings to explore under which conditions IPAs are likely to enjoy authority. Based on a review of the literature and on conceptual clarifications, we define authority as a social relationship between holders and granters of authority. We distinguish two types of authority, namely, political and expert authority, and two forms of recognition, namely, in practice (de facto) and by formal delegation (de jure). Given that the de facto expert authority of IPAs has received least attention in the literature, while the PA literature reminds us that knowledge lies at the heart of bureaucratic power, we develop propositions on how de facto expert authority could be measured and how the anticipated variation of expert authority among IPAs could be explained. We illustrate our argument with reference to empirical findings in the IR and PA literature. We conclude by highlighting the implications of our discussion for future research on the authority of national and IPAs.
Since the economic crisis in 2008, European youth unemployment rates have been persistently high at around 20% on average. The majority of European countries spends significant resources each year on active labor market programs (ALMP) with the aim of improving the integration prospects of struggling youths. Among the most common programs used are training courses, job search assistance and monitoring, subsidized employment, and public work programs. For policy makers, it is of upmost importance to know which of these programs work and which are able to achieve the intended goals – may it be the integration into the first labor market or further education. Based on a detailed assessment of the particularities of the youth labor market situation, we discuss the pros and cons of different ALMP types. We then provide a comprehensive survey of the recent evidence on the effectiveness of these ALMP for youth in Europe, highlighting factors that seem to promote or impede their effectiveness in practice. Overall, the findings with respect to employment outcomes are only partly promising. While job search assistance (with and without monitoring) results in overwhelmingly positive effects, we find more mixed effects for training and wage subsidies, whereas the effects for public work programs are clearly negative. The evidence on the impact of ALMP on furthering education participation as well as employment quality is scarce, requiring additional research and allowing only limited conclusions so far.
Conclusion
(2016)
This chapter revisits the role of the new modes of governance in areas of limited statehood. First, it states that there is no linear relationship between degrees of statehood and the overall effectiveness of new modes of sustainability governance. Second, the chapter states that, in most of the cases, national governments are hesitant or even actively hamper the development of new modes of governance. Third, it shows that the absence of the shadow of hierarchy can indeed lead to ineffective new modes of governance. However, the shadow of hierarchy does not necessarily need to be cast by states. Finally, the author reviews the complexities involved in participatory practices, stressing the importance of institutional structures and knowledgeable brokers. The chapter concludes by outlining fields for future research.
This chapter investigates the trajectory of establishing the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) in the early 1990s as the first private transnational certification organization with an antagonistic stakeholder body. Its main contribution is a micro-analysis of the founding assembly in 1993. By investigating the role of brokers within the negotiation as one institutional scope condition for ‘arguing’ having occurred, the chapter adopts a dramaturgical approach. It contends that the authority of brokers is not necessarily institutionally given, but needs to be gained: brokers have to prove situationally that their knowledge is relevant and that they are speaking impartially in the interest of progress rather than their own. The chapter stresses the importance of procedural knowledge which brokers provide in contrast to policy knowledge.
Introduction
(2016)
The Paris Agreement for Climate Change or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) rely on new modes of governance for implementation. Indeed, new modes of governance such as market-based instruments, public-private partnerships or multi-stakeholder initiatives have been praised for playing a pivotal role in effective and legitimate sustainability governance. Yet, do they also deliver in areas of limited statehood? States such as Malaysia or the Dominican Republic partly lack the ability to implement and enforce rules; their statehood is limited. This introduction provides the analytical framework of this volume and critically examines the performance of new modes of governance in areas of limited statehood, drawing on the book’s in-depth case studies on issues of climate change, biodiversity, and health.