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Challenges, triggers and initiators of climate policies and implications for policy formulation
(2020)
The German system of public sector employment (including civil servants and public employees) qualifies as a classical European continental civil service model moulded in traditional forms of a Weberian bureaucracy. Its features include a career-based employment system with entry based on levels of formal qualification. Coordinated by legal frames and centralised collective bargaining, the civil service is, at the same time, decentralised and flexible enough to accommodate regional differences and societal changes. In comparison, the civil service system stands out for its high degrees of professionalism and legal fairness with low levels of corruption or cronyism.
Clubs of autocrats
(2021)
While scholars have argued that membership in Regional Organizations (ROs) can increase the likelihood of democratization, we see many autocratic regimes surviving in power albeit being members of several ROs. This article argues that this is the case because these regimes are often members in "Clubs of Autocrats" that supply material and ideational resources to strengthen domestic survival politics and shield members from external interference during moments of political turmoil. The argument is supported by survival analysis testing the effect of membership in autocratic ROs on regime survival between 1946 to 2010. It finds that membership in ROs composed of more autocratic member states does in fact raise the likelihood of regime survival by protecting incumbents against democratic challenges such as civil unrest or political dissent. However, autocratic RO membership does not help to prevent regime breakdown due to autocratic challenges like military coups, potentially because these types of threats are less likely to diffuse to other member states. The article thereby adds to our understanding of the limits of democratization and potential reverse effects of international cooperation, and contributes to the literature addressing interdependences of international and domestic politics in autocratic regimes.
Climate change threatens to undermine efforts to eradicate extreme poverty. However, climate policies could impose a financial burden on the global poor through increased energy and food prices. Here, we project poverty rates until 2050 and assess how they are influenced by mitigation policies consistent with the 1.5 degrees C target. A continuation of historical trends will leave 350 million people globally in extreme poverty by 2030. Without progressive redistribution, climate policies would push an additional 50 million people into poverty. However, redistributing the national carbon pricing revenues domestically as an equal-per-capita climate dividend compensates this policy side effect, even leading to a small net reduction of the global poverty headcount (-6 million). An additional international climate finance scheme enables a substantial poverty reduction globally and also in Sub-Saharan Africa. Combining national redistribution with international climate finance thus provides an important entry point to climate policy in developing countries. Ambitious climate policies can negatively impact the global poor by affecting income, food and energy prices. Here, the authors quantify this effect, and show that it can be compensated by national redistribution of the carbon pricing revenues in combination with international climate finance.
The contribution summarises the scientific discussion and research activities of the EGPA Permanent Study Group 4 (PSG 4) “Local Governance and Local Democracy”, founded in 2005. The impetus for proposing this specific PSG was the growing importance of the local level within the multi-level governance system in the European Union and most of its member states. The PSG 4 acts as a European network of research activities inside and outside EGPA, producing joint publications and organising scientific debates on many problems of the development of municipalities and local authorities. Our focus was on discussing both how to improve democracy by increased participation and deliberation, and how to secure provision of services in an efficient way in developed welfare societies. This includes analysing several forms of administrative changes and reforms at the local level and research of representative, direct and cooperative democracy at local level in a cross-European comparison.
Comparatice methods B
(2020)
Comparative vote switching
(2024)
Large literatures focus on voter reactions to parties’ policy strategies, agency, or legislative performance. While many inquiries make explicit assumptions about the direction and magnitude of voter flows between parties, comparative empirical analyses of vote switching remain rare. In this article, we overcome three challenges that have previously impeded the comparative study of dynamic party competition based on voter flows: we present a novel conceptual framework for studying voter retention, defection, and attraction in multiparty systems, showcase a newly compiled data infrastructure that marries comparative vote switching data with information on party behavior and party systems in over 250 electoral contexts, and introduce a statistical model that renders our conceptual framework operable. These innovations enable first-time inquiries into the polyadic vote switching patterns underlying multiparty competition and unlock major research potentials on party competition and party system change.
The study of subnational and local government systems and reforms has become an increasingly salient topic in comparative public administration. In many European countries, policy implementation, the execution of public tasks and the delivery of services to citizens are largely carried out by local governments, which, at the same time, have been subjected to multiple reforms and sometimes comprehensive institutional re-organizations. This chapter discusses analytical key concepts and outcomes of the comparative study of local governments and local government reforms. It outlines frameworks and analytical tools to capture the variety of institutional settings and developments at the local level of government. It provides an introduction into crucial comparative dimensions, such as functional, territorial and political profiles of local governments, and analyses current reform approaches and outcomes based on recent empirical findings. Finally, the chapter addresses salient issues to be taken up in future comparative studies about local government.
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.
Conclusion
(2020)
Does political repression work for authoritarian rule? On the one hand, repression is a hallmark of authoritarian governance. It denotes any action governments take to increase the costs of collective action. Autocrats consciously apply repression to curb popular opposition within their territorial jurisdiction. They repress in order to protect their policies, personnel, or other interests against challenges from below. Repression is, thus, a means to the end of political survival in non-democratic contexts. A useful means lives up to its promises. Does repression do that? This project started on the suspicion that we do not yet know the answer. This concluding chapter recalls the key theoretical ideas developed along the way, highlights the main findings of the book, and concludes with opportunities for future research.
Conclusion
(2019)
Conclusion
(2023)
Based on the previous findings in this book, Chapter 18 by Heike Krieger and Andrea Liese discusses the general dynamics of change or metamorphosis in the international legal order. They discern a mixed picture of an international order between metamorphosis—that is, a more fundamental transformation—of international law, norm change, turbulences, and robustness. They explain drivers of change and highlight factors such as national interests during the war on terror, changing long-term foreign policy beliefs, and the rise in populism and autocracy, before discussing the most common strategies the actors involved use. Other relevant factors include changes in the political environment, such as shocks and power shifts or the ambiguous role of fragmentation. Moreover, they identify factors that make legal norms robust, including the vital role of norm defenders and legal and institutional structures as stabilizing elements. Krieger and Liese conclude by cautioning that if the attacks on the international order continue at the current frequency and magnitude, a metamorphosis of international law will likely be unstoppable.
Conclusion : Tensions, Challenges, and Future "Flags" of Local Public Sector Reforms and Comparative
(2016)
This chapter outlines the strategy of the European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) and reflects on some of its key strengths, and how these may equip the European community of scholars and practitioners of public administration (PA) to contribute to the development of the field. The chapter reviews the key trait of the EGPA organisational model: the Permanent Study Groups, which are communities of scholars centred on the key areas of the administrative sciences in Europe. It also discusses the partnerships that EGPA has developed with key institutions in Europe and beyond, and highlights the significance of the EGPA policy papers on European governance. Finally, it discusses the strategic, forward-looking project European Perspectives on Public Administration, which aims to reflect on the future of the research and teaching of public administration.
As expected, the traditions of national-state migration policies continue to play a very important role, path-dependence in this policy field remains high. The distribution of competences in migration policy and the integration of migrants in the nation states continues to be very different. When implementing integration strategies at grassroots level, the respective policies should be tailored to the profile of both the local migrant community and the native population. Besides better migration management in local administration and the interaction of top-down and bottom-up efforts to integrate migrants is of importance.
The recent debate on administrative bodies in international organizations has brought forward multiple theoretical perspectives, analytical frameworks, and methodological approaches. Despite these efforts to advance knowledge on these actors, the research program on international public administrations (IPAs) has missed out on two important opportunities: reflection on scholarship in international relations (IR) and public administration and synergies between these disciplinary perspectives. Against this backdrop, the essay is a discussion of the literature on IPAs in IR and public administration. We found influence, authority, and autonomy of international bureaucracies have been widely addressed and helped to better understand the agency of such non-state actors in global policy-making. Less attention has been given to the crucial macro-level context of politics for administrative bodies, despite the importance in IR and public administration scholarship. We propose a focus on agency and politics as future avenues for a comprehensive, joint research agenda for international bureaucracies.
Despite high institutional hurdles for constitutional change, one observes surprisingly many EU treaty revisions. This article takes up the questions of what determines whether a treaty provision is successfully changed and why provisions are renegotiated at subsequent Intergovernmental Conferences. The article presents an institutionalist theory explaining success and renegotiation and tests the theory using all core institutional provisions by means of Qualitative Comparative Analysis. The causal analysis shows that low conflict potential of an issue is sufficient for successfully changing the treaties. Furthermore, high conflict potential of an issue and its fundamental change are sufficient for it to be renegotiated.
Based upon the current debate on international practices with its focus on taken-for-granted everyday practices, we examine how Security Council practices may affect member state action and collective decisions on intrastate conflicts. We outline a concept that integrates the structuring effect of practices and their emergence from interaction among reflective actors. It promises to overcome the unresolved tension between understanding practices as a social regularity and as a fluid entity. We analyse the constitutive mechanisms of two Council practices that affect collective decisions on intrastate conflicts and elucidate how even reflective Council members become enmeshed with the constraining implications of evolving practices and their normative implications. (1) Previous Council decisions create precedent pressure and give rise to a virtually uncontested permissive Council practice that defines the purview for intervention into such conflicts. (2) A ratcheting practice forces opponents to choose between accepting steadily reinforced Council action, as occurred regarding Sudan/Darfur, and outright blockade, as in the case of Syria. We conclude that practices constitute a source of influence that is not captured by the traditional perspectives on Council activities as the consequence of geopolitical interests or of externally evolving international norms like the ‘responsibility to protect’ (R2P).
Contesting citizenship
(2022)
Democracy and citizenship are conceptually and empirically contested. Against the backdrop of recent and current profound transformations in and of democratic societies, this volume presents and discusses acute contestations, within and beyond national borders and boundaries. Democracy’s crucial relationships, between state and citizenry as well as amongst citizens, are rearranged and re-ordered in various spheres and arenas, impacting on core democratic principles such as accountability, legitimacy, participation and trust. This volume addresses these refigurations by bringing together empirical analyses and conceptual considerations regarding the access to and exclusion from citizenship rights in the face of migration regulation and institutional transformation, and the role of violence in maintaining or undermining social order. With its critical reflection on the consequences and repercussions of such processes for citizens’ everyday lives and for the meaning of citizenship altogether, this book transgresses disciplinary boundaries and puts into dialogue the perspectives of political theory and sociology.
Coping, taming or solving
(2017)
One of the truisms of policy analysis is that policy problems are rarely solved. As an ever-increasing number of policy issues are identified as an inherently ill-structured and intractable type of wicked problem, the question of what policy analysis sets out to accomplish has emerged as more central than ever. If solving wicked problems is beyond reach, research on wicked problems needs to provide a clearer understanding of the alternatives. The article identifies and explicates three distinguishable strategies of problem governance: coping, taming and solving. It shows that their intellectual premises and practical implications clearly contrast in core respects. The article argues that none of the identified strategies of problem governance is invariably more suitable for dealing with wicked problems. Rather than advocate for some universally applicable approach to the governance of wicked problems, the article asks under what conditions different ways of governing wicked problems are analytically reasonable and normatively justified. It concludes that a more systematic assessment of alternative approaches of problem governance requires a reorientation of the debate away from the conception of wicked problems as a singular type toward the more focused analysis of different dimensions of problem wickedness.
The liberal international order is being challenged and international organizations (IOs) are a main target of contestation. COVID-19 seems to exacerbate the situation with many states pursuing domestic strategies at the expense of multilateral cooperation. At the same time, IOs have traditionally benefited from cross-border crises. This article analyzes the policy responses of IOs to the exogenous COVID-19 shock by asking why some IOs use this crisis as an opportunity to expand their scope and policy instruments? It provides a cross-sectional analysis using original data on the responses of 75 IOs to COVID-19 during the first wave between March and June 2020. It finds that the bureaucratic capacity of IOs is significant when it comes to using the crisis as an opportunity. It also finds some evidence that the number of COVID-19 cases among the member states affects policy responses and that general purpose IOs have benefited more.
Cross-national variation in the relationship between welfare generosity and single mother employment
(2022)
Reform of the U.S. welfare system in 1996 spurred claims that cuts to welfare programs effectively incentivized single mothers to find employment. It is difficult to assess the veracity of those claims, however, absent evidence of how the relationship between welfare benefits and single mother employment generalizes across countries. This study combines data from the European Union Labour Force Survey and the U.S. Current Population Survey (1992-2015) into one of the largest samples of single mothers ever, testing the relationships between welfare generosity and single mothers’ employment and work hours. We find no consistent evidence of a negative relationship between welfare generosity and single mother employment outcomes. Rather, we find tremendous cross-national heterogeneity, which does not clearly correspond to well-known institutional variations. Our findings demonstrate the limitations of single country studies and the pervasive, salient interactions between institutional contexts and social policies.
Emmanuel Kant asked three important questions which will always be with us: What can we know? What should we do? What may we hope for? These three key existentialist questions are, of course, also relevant for a reflection on the future of Public Administration: What can we know, as researchers in the field of Public Administration, about our object of public administration? What should we do as researchers and teachers to make sure we remain part of a solution and to guarantee that we are ahead of reality and its future problems? What kind of improvement (or not) may we hope for a public sector in an increasingly complex society? This chapter tries to explore some possible answers to these three important questions for our field of Public Administration. The background is our common project about ‘European Perspectives for Public Administration’ (EPPA), which we hope to establish as a continuous dialogue and discourse in the context of European Public Administration and the ‘European Group for Public Administration’ (EGPA).
Cyber warfare is a timely and relevant issue and one of the most controversial in international humanitarian law (IHL). The aim of IHL is to set rules and limits in terms of means and methods of warfare. In this context, a key question arises: Has digital warfare rules or limits, and if so, how are these applicable? Traditional principles, developed over a long period, are facing a new dimension of challenges due to the rise of cyber warfare. This paper argues that to overcome this new issue, it is critical that new humanity-oriented approaches is developed with regard to cyber warfare. The challenge is to establish a legal regime for cyber-attacks, successfully addressing human rights norms and standards. While clarifying this from a legal perspective, the authors can redesign the sensitive equilibrium between humanity and military necessity, weighing the humanitarian aims of IHL and the protection of civilians-in combination with international human rights law and other relevant legal regimes-in a different manner than before.
Das Abendland
(2019)
The religious borders of Europe, which are more evident and controversial than ever, challenge established forms of political legitimacy and the legal requirements for citizenship. Perhaps covertly rather than overtly, they shape politics and policies. While scholars have once again resorted to Edward Said’s Orientalism to describe the dynamic at play, this article argues that the Orientalism narrative of East and West is too simple to capture the actual complexity of Europe’s borders. There are four religious and thus four cultural-symbolic borders, which are increasingly defining the continent: north-western Europe is Protestant, southern Europe is Catholic, the East is Orthodox and increasingly nationalist, and the South and Near East are Muslim. The cultural purity and the values that Europe craves in search of identity and order are simply not available in a world of global interconnectedness and social diversity.
International organizations (IOs) experience significant variation in their decision-making performance, or the extent to which they produce policy output. While some IOs are efficient decision-making machineries, others are plagued by deadlock. How can such variation be explained? Examining this question, the article makes three central contributions. First, we approach performance by looking at IO decision-making in terms of policy output and introduce an original measure of decision-making performance that captures annual growth rates in IO output. Second, we offer a novel theoretical explanation for decision-making performance. This account highlights the role of institutional design, pointing to how majoritarian decision rules, delegation of authority to supranational institutions, and access for transnational actors (TNAs) interact to affect decision-making. Third, we offer the first comparative assessment of the decision-making performance of IOs. While previous literature addresses single IOs, we explore decision-making across a broad spectrum of 30 IOs from 1980 to 2011. Our analysis indicates that IO decision-making performance varies across and within IOs. We find broad support for our theoretical account, showing the combined effect of institutional design features in shaping decision-making performance. Notably, TNA access has a positive effect on decision-making performance when pooling is greater, and delegation has a positive effect when TNA access is higher. We also find that pooling has an independent, positive effect on decision-making performance. All-in-all, these findings suggest that the institutional design of IOs matters for their decision-making performance, primarily in more complex ways than expected in earlier research.
While a growing body of literature finds positive impacts of Start-Up Subsidies (SUS) on labor market outcomes of participants, little is known about how the design of these programs shapes their effectiveness and hence how to improve policy. As experimental variation in program design is unavailable, we exploit the 2011 reform of the current German SUS program for the unemployed which strengthened caseworkers' discretionary power, increased entry requirements and reduced monetary support. We estimate the impact of the reform on the program's effectiveness using samples of participants and non-participants from before and after the reform. To control for time-constant unobserved heterogeneity as well as differential selection patterns based on observable characteristics over time, we combine Difference-in-Differences with inverse probability weighting using covariate balancing propensity scores. Holding participants' observed characteristics as well as macroeconomic conditions constant, the results suggest that the reform was successful in raising employment effects on average. As these findings may be contaminated by changes in selection patterns based on unobserved characteristics, we assess our results using simulation-based sensitivity analyses and find that our estimates are highly robust to changes in unobserved characteristics. Hence, the reform most likely had a positive impact on the effectiveness of the program, suggesting that increasing entry requirements and reducing support increased the program's impacts while reducing the cost per participant. (C) 2021 Economic Society of Australia, Queensland. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
This article analyses salient trade-offs in the design of democracy. It grounds this analysis in a distinction between two basic models of democracy: simple and complex majoritarianism. These models differ not only in their electoral and party systems, but also in the style of coalition-building. Simple majoritarianism concentrates executive power in a single majority party; complex majoritarianism envisions the formation of shifting, issue-specific coalitions among multiple parties whose programs differ across multiple conflict dimensions. The latter pattern of coalition formation is very difficult to create and sustain under pure parliamentary government. A separation of powers between executive and legislature can facilitate such a pattern, while also achieving central goals of simple majoritarianism: identifiable cabinet alternatives before the election and stable cabinets afterward. The separation of powers can thus balance simple and complex majoritarianism in ways that are unavailable under parliamentarism. The article also compares the presidential and semi-parliamentary versions of the separation of powers. It argues that the latter has important advantages, e.g., when it comes to resolving inter-branch deadlock, as it avoids the concentration of executive power in a single human being.
Almost twenty years after its recognition in international human rights law, the human right to water continues to spark discussions about its scope and meaning. This article revisits the evolution and contestation of the right's first international legal framework, General Comment No. 15 from the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The analysis highlights the contestation of economic and social rights as a universal phenomenon at multiple levels, but argues that these meaning-making practices can support their validation and recognition.
After some seventy years of intensive debates, there is an increasingly strong consensus within the academic and practitioner communities that development is both an objective and a process towards improving the quality of people's lives in various societal dimensions – economic, social, environmental, cultural and political – and about how subjectively satisfied they are with it. Since 2015, the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations (UN) reflect such consensus. The sections behind this argument are based on a review of (i) three key theoretical contributions to development and different phases of development thinking; (ii) global and regional governance arrangements and institutions for development cooperation; (iii) upcoming challenges to development policy and practice stemming from a series of new global challenges; and, (iv) development policy as a long and steady, increasingly global and participatory learning process.
We revisit the concept of Diversified Quality Production (DQP), which we introduced about 30 years ago. Our purpose is to examine the extent to which the concept can still be considered tenable for describing and explaining the development of the interaction between the political economy and concepts of production, notably in Germany. First, we show why and in which ways DQP was more heterogeneous than we had originally understood. Then, on the basis of evidence with respect to political, business, and economic changes in Germany, we show that DQP Mark I, a regime by and large characteristic of the 1980s, turned into DQP Mark II. In the process, major ‘complementarities’ disappeared between the late 1980s and now—mainly the complementarity between production modes on the one hand and industrial relations and economic regulation on the other. While the latter exhibit greater change, business strategies and production organization show more continuity, which helps explain how Germany maintained economic performance after the mid-2000s, more than other countries in Europe. Conceptually, our most important result is that the complementarities emphasized in political economy are historically relative and limited, so that they should not be postulated as stable configurations.
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.
This chapter highlights the role and contribution of EGPA in educating and socializing the next generation of young researchers into the interdisciplinary community of public administration, management and policy scholars in Europe. In doing so, it also provides an overview of the current state of the art in doctoral education in the field of public administration in Europe. Against this background, the chapter presents the annual “EGPA Workshop for PhDs and Young Researchers” (or for short: the EGPA PhD project) in the context of changing institutional settings and academic markets of PhD education in Europe. Consequently, EGPA carries an important responsibility as a representative of the public administration community in shaping the course of PhD education in our field in Europe.
Does complementarity between restrictions and violence stabilize authoritarian power-sharing in the face of popular rebellion? Scholars widely concur that the central political conflict in authoritarian regimes plays out between people on the inside of the regime. This chapter adds to the debate and studies coup attempts in light of two interconnected hypotheses. First, violence against campaigns destabilizes power-sharing because it exposes a weak leadership. Second, this adverse effect of violence declines as the routine level of restrictions increases, because restrictions act as a sorting mechanism for uncompromising political opposition. Both hypotheses are tested using Bayesian multilevel statistical analysis on a data set of 253 coup attempts in 198 authoritarian regimes between 1949 and 2007. This study design allows separation of repression’s time-dependent effects from its context effects, and it demonstrates the value of Bayesian methods for studying rare political phenomena such as coups d’état. The chapter’s conclusion, however, is straightforward: Once citizens form campaigns, repression can only deteriorate the situation because it opens a frontline right at the center of authoritarian rule.
Campaigns against authoritarian rule trigger the problems of authoritarian control and power-sharing. Hence, autocrats cannot ignore campaigns, but can they repress them? This chapter hypothesizes that restrictions and violence do just that—if those forms of political repression complement each other. Each variant of political repression has drawbacks: Restrictions dampen, but they do not eliminate interdependent behavior; violence imposes high individual costs on dissent, but it frequently backfires against its originators. Complementarity asserts that those drawbacks matter less when both variants of repression work in tandem. Statistical analysis of 50 campaigns distributed across 112 authoritarian regimes between 1977 and 2001 yields mixed support for the argument. Based on a binary probit model with sample selection correction, the analysis adds a preemptive and a reactive aspect to political repression. The results imply that complementarity matters as long as repression preempts campaigns, but not when it reacts to them. Moreover, once citizens knock at the palace gates, restrictions turn futile. Finally, violence reduces the outlook for successful resistance against authoritarian rule, but it also backfires at all times—preemptive and reactive. By implication, political repression thwarts successful resistance today, but it breeds more resistance tomorrow.
East and South
(2022)
"What is 'Europe' in academic discourse? While Europe tends to be used as shorthand, often interchangeable with the 'West', neither the 'West' nor 'Europe' are homogeneous spaces. Though postcolonial studies have long been debunking Eurocentrism in its multiple guises, there is still work to do in fully comprehending how its imaginations and discursive legacies conceive the figure of Europe, as not all who live on European soil are understood as equally 'European'. This volume explores this immediate need to rethink the axis of postcolonial cultural productions, to disarticulate Eurocentrism, to recognise Europe as a more diverse, plural and fluid space, to draw forward cultural exchanges and dialogues within the Global South. Through analyses of literary texts from East-Central Europe and beyond, this volume sheds light on alternative literary cartographies - the multiplicity of Europes and being European which exist both as they are viewed from the different geographies of the global South, and within the continent itself. Covering a wide spatial and temporal terrain in postcolonial and European cultural productions, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature and literary criticism, cultural studies, post-colonial studies, Global South studies and European studies"
Extreme weather events like heavy rainfall and heat waves will likely increase in intensity and frequency due to climate change. As the impacts of these extremes are particularly prominent in urban agglomerations, cities face an urgent need to develop adaptation strategies. Ecosystem-based Adaptation (EbA) provides helpful strategies that harness ecological processes in addition to technical interventions. EbA has been addressed in informal adaptation planning. Formal municipality planning, namely landscape planning, is supposed to include traditionally some EbA measures, although adaptation has not been their explicit focus. Our research aims to investigate how landscape plans incorporate climate-related extremes and EbA as well as to discuss the potential to enhance EbA uptake in formal planning. We conducted a document analysis of informal planning documents from 85 German cities and the analysis of formal landscape plans of 61 of these cities. The results suggest that city size does affect the extent of informal planning instruments and the comprehensiveness of formal landscape plans. Climate-related extremes and EbA measures have traditionally been part of landscape planning. Almost all landscape plans address heat stress, while climate change and heavy rain have been addressed less often, though more frequently since 2008. Greening of walls and roofs, on-site infiltration and water retention reveal significant potential for better integration in landscape plans. Landscape planning offers an entry point for effective climate adaptation through EbA in cities. Informal and formal planning instruments should be closely combined for robust, spatially explicit, legally binding implementation of EbA measures in the future.
Editorial
(2017)
Editorial Board
(2017)
Effectiveness
(2021)
Electricity production contributes to a significant share of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe and is thus an important driver of climate change. To fulfil the Paris Agreement, the European Union (EU) needs a rapid transition to a fully decarbonised power production system. Presumably, such a system will be largely based on renewables. So far, many EU countries have supported a shift towards renewables such as solar and wind power using support schemes, but the economic and political context is changing. Renewables are now cheaper than ever before and have become cost-competitive with conventional technologies. Therefore, European policymakers are striving to better integrate renewables into a competitive market and to increase the cost-effectiveness of the expansion of renewables. The first step was to replace previous fixed-price schemes with competitive auctions. In a second step, these auctions have become more technology-open. Finally, some governments may phase out any support for renewables and fully expose them to the competitive power market.
However, such policy changes may be at odds with the need to rapidly expand renewables and meet national targets due to market characteristics and investors’ risk perception. Without support, price risks are higher, and it may be difficult to meet an investor’s income expectations. Furthermore, policy changes across different countries could have unexpected effects if power markets are interconnected and investors able to shift their investments. Finally, in multi-technology auctions, technologies may dominate, which can be a risk for long-term power system reliability. Therefore, in my thesis, I explore the effects of phasing out support policies for renewables, of coordinating these phase-outs across countries, and of using multi-technology designs. I expand the public policy literature about investment behaviour and policy design as well as policy change and coordination, and I further develop an agent-based model.
The main questions of my thesis are what the cost and deployment effects of gradually exposing renewables to market forces would be and how coordination between countries affects investors’ decisions and market prices.. In my three contributions to the academic literature, I use different methods and come to the following results. In the first contribution, I use a conjoint analysis and market simulation to evaluate the effects of phasing out support or reintroducing feed-in tariffs from the perspective of investors. I find that a phase-out leads to investment shifts, either to other still-supported technologies or to other countries that continue to offer support. I conclude that the coordination of policy changes avoids such shifts.. In the second contribution, I integrate the empirically-derived preferences from the first contribution in to an agent-based power system model of two countries to simulate the effects of ending auctions for renewables. I find that this slows the energy transition, and that cross-border effects are relevant. Consequently, continued support is necessary to meet the national renewables targets. In the third contribution, I analyse the outcome of past multi-technology auctions using descriptive statistics, regression analysis as well as case study comparisons. I find that the outcomes are skewed towards single technologies. This cannot be explained by individual design elements of the auctions, but rather results from context-specific and country-specific characteristics. Based on this, I discuss potential implications for long-term power system reliability.
The main conclusions of my thesis are that a complete phase-out of renewables support would slow down the energy transition and thus jeopardize climate targets, and that multi-technology auctions may pose a risk for some countries, especially those that cannot regulate an unbalanced power plant portfolio in the long term. If policymakers decide to continue supporting renewables, they may consider adopting technology-specific auctions to better steer their portfolio. In contrast, if policymakers still want to phase out support, they should coordinate these policy changes with other countries. Otherwise, overall transition costs can be higher, because investment decisions shift to still-supported but more expensive technologies.
The chapter aims at addressing collaboration between the two main professional organizations in the field of Public Administration in Europe—the European Group of Public Administration (EGPA) and the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in Central and Eastern Europe (NISPAcee)—in their contribution to understanding, creating and institutionalizing the European Administrative Space. While the chapter gives an overview of both informal collaboration between Eastern and Western European scholars, and a joint accreditation initiative (EAPAA), its main focus is on Trans-European Dialogue (TED). The chapter outlines the challenges for the future of TED and proposes other potential ways of EGPA-NISPAcee collaboration.
Although German Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were on the same side in the Cold War, as well as in the same family of moderate centre-right parties, despite being roughly the same age and sharing a fundamental market-economic and Atlanticist orientation, they were not in harmony emotionally. This analysis demonstrates how different genders, incompatible conceptions of nation, history, and regional origins, as well as experiences of mutual frustration eclipsed their ideological commonalities and counteracted against the 'emotional regimes' of 'the West' in the Cold War. It breaks new ground in several respects. First, it does not examine strong feelings that blotted out all others but rather a range of more ambivalent and nuanced emotions. Second, it links the themes of gender and feeling by enquiring about the male or female manifestations and attributions of certain emotions. Third, it focuses on not only men and women at the top but considers their entourages as either amplifiers or 'shock absorbers' of the leaders' feelings. Finally, it explores the scope and limits of the notion that the Cold War was an 'emotional regime'.
This paper starts from the premise that Western states are connected to some of the harms refugees suffer from. It specifically focuses on the harm of acts of misrecognition and its relation to epistemic injustice that refugees suffer from in refugee camps, in detention centers, and during their desperate attempts to find refuge. The paper discusses the relation between hermeneutical injustice and acts of misrecognition, showing that these two phenomena are interconnected and that acts of misrecognition are particularly damaging when (a) they stretch over different contexts, leaving us without or with very few safe spaces, and (b) they dislocate us, leaving us without a community to turn to. The paper then considers the ways in which refugees experience acts of misrecognition and suffer from hermeneutical injustice, using the case of unaccompanied children at the well-known and overcrowded camp Moria in Greece, the case of unsafe detention centers in Libya, and the case of the denial to assistance on the Mediterranean and the resulting pushbacks from international waters to Libya as well as the preventable drowning of refugees in the Mediterranean to illustrate the arguments. Finally, the paper argues for specific duties toward refugees that result from the prior arguments on misrecognition and hermeneutical injustice.
Global food security governance is fraught with fragmentation, overlap and complexity. While calls for coordination and coherence abound, establishing an inter-organizational order at this level seems to remain difficult. While the emphasis in the literature has so far been on the global level, we know less about dynamics of inter-organizational relations in food security governance at the country level, and empirical studies are lacking. It is this research gap the article seeks to address by posing the following research question: In how far does inter-organizational order develop in the organizational field of food security governance at the country level? Theoretically and conceptually, the article draws on sociological institutionalism, and on work on inter-organizational relations. Empirically, the article conducts an exploratory case study of the organizational field of food security governance in Côte d’Ivoire, building on a qualitative content analysis of organizational documents covering a period from 2003 to 2016 and semi-structured interviews with staff of international organizations from 2016. The article demonstrates that not all of the developments attributed to food security governance at the global level play out in the same way at the country level. Rather, in the case of Côte d’Ivoire there are signs for a certain degree of coherence between IOs in the field of food security governance and even for an – albeit limited – division of labour. However, this only holds for specific dimensions of the inter-organizational order and appears to be subject to continuous contestation and reinterpretation under the surface.
During COVID-19, various public institutions tried to shape citizens’ behaviour to slow the spread of the pandemic. How did their authority affect citizens’ support of public measures taken to combat the spread of COVID-19? The article makes two contributions. First, it presents a novel conceptualisation of authority as a source heuristic. Second, it analyses the authority of four types of public institutions (health ministries, universities, public health agencies, the WHO) in two countries (Germany and the UK), drawing on novel data from a survey experiment conducted in May 2020. On average, institutional endorsements seem to have mattered little. However, there is an observable polarisation effect where citizens who ascribe much expertise to public institutions support COVID-19 measures more than the control group. Furthermore, those who ascribe little expertise support them less than the control group. Finally, neither perception of biases nor exposure to institutions in public debates seems consistently to affect their authority.
Federal Administration
(2021)
The federal administration is significantly small (around 10 percent of all public employees). This speciality of the German administrative system is based on the division of responsibilities: the central (federal) level drafts and adopts most of the laws and public programmes, and the state level (together with the municipal level) implements them. The administration of the federal level comprises the ministries, subordinated agencies for special and selected operational tasks (e.g. the authorisation of drugs, information security and registration of refugees) in distinct administrative sectors (e.g. foreign service, armed forces and federal police). The capacity for preparing and monitoring government bills and statutory instruments is well developed. Moreover, the instruments and tools of coordination are exemplary compared with other countries, although the recent digital turn has been adopted less advanced than elsewhere.
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.
Fighting ISIS in Syria
(2022)
This paper analyses the Operation Euphrates Shield (OES) al-Bab battle and presents the lessons learned. OES started with a mixed force of Free Syrian Army, Turkish special forces and armoured units. During the operation, the aims and the force structure gradually changed, yet not the command structure. When OES aimed to capture al-Bab, ISIS employed conventional active defence strategy. The OES commander's insistence on employing special forces increased own casualties and al-Bab was seized only after resorting to a conventional urban attack. OES presents tactical and operational lessons for the militaries on structure and execution of operations against an irregular adversary employing conventional means.
Fin du globe
(2021)
This essay argues that Oscar Wilde noticeably contributed to the emerging discourse about world literature, even though his views in this regard have to be unearthed from the margins of his works, from his early and unpublished American lectures and 'between the lines' of his major critical essays. Wilde's implicit ideas around world literature can be understood as being closely related to his broader endeavour of redirecting and revaluing the pejorative discourse around 'decadence' in art and literature. More specifically, the arch-aesthete preferred to use the word 'romance' rather than 'decadence' (a term he hardly used at all in his writings), signalling a sensitivity attuned to what he called the 'love of things impossible'. This reconceptualization of the decadent outlook was to inspire a critical ideal of literature which relied on creatively activating the other as Other, culminating in a vision of intersubjective, transcultural and unlimited literary communication. Wilde's thought can be more specifically understood as anticipating central tenets of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's evocations of the planetary, thus preparing the way for an alterity-oriented understanding of literary cosmopolitanism.
Foreword
(2018)
International institutions are an essential driving force of contemporary policies to combat gender-based violence but remain toothless if political actors do not implement them in domestic policies. How can scholars conceptualise the transposition of international gender-based violence norms into domestic policies? I argue that discourse network analysis provides a powerful conceptual and methodological extension of critical frame analysis to understand how frames shape the meaning of gender-based violence norms in multi-level institutional contexts. Frames’ normative and cognitive network structure invites combining discourse network and frame analysis techniques that locate frames’ power in their ability to connect different institutional spheres temporally and spatially. I outline a multi-level research agenda that traces the framing processes of international norms and their domestic implementation through gender-based violence policies in the Council of Europe’s Istanbul Convention. This agenda includes avenues to study how complex transnational policy frameworks like the Istanbul Convention play out in domestic policy implementation.
From laggards to leaders
(2021)
The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change embraces the participation of non-state actors in a separate governance track – the ‘Non-state actor zone for global action’ (nazca) – that runs alongside the formal track of unfccc negotiations and the implementation of the Paris Agreement by State Parties through ‘nationally determined contributions’. unfccc Secretariat is entrusted with orchestrating non-state global and transnational initiatives, partnerships and networks. The involvement of non-state actors in the implementation of the Paris Agreement helps to address an action gap by countries that are unable or unwilling to implement ambitious ndcs.
However, the increased prominence of initiatives driven by non-state actors also increases their direct and indirect influence on processes and rules which raises a number of questions with regards to the legitimacy of action and the democratic deficit of the global climate regime. Balancing legitimacy with effectiveness requires non-state initiatives to ensure transparent and inclusive governance, and accountability towards progress against their goals and pledges.
Despite its encouragement towards private initiatives, the Paris Agreement creates surprisingly little regulatory space for non-state actors to gain hold. Neither are there measures that would link ndcs to nazca initiatives, nor are functional requirements such as transparency or reporting extended to non-state initiatives. While the Paris Agreement marks an important step towards harnessing private sector ability and ambition for climate action, more remains to be done to create a truly enabling framework for private action to strive and complement public efforts to address climate change.
From victims to activists
(2022)
Over the past decades, the traditional profile of the German administrative system has significantly been reshaped and remoulded through reforms and transformations. Manifold modernization efforts have been undertaken to adjust administrative structures and procedures to increasing challenges and pressures. In this chapter, the attempt is made to outline major institutional reform paths in Germany from Weberian bureaucracy to most recent reforms towards a digital transformation of public administration. We will show to what extent the German administrative system has moved away from the classical Weberian bureaucracy to a hybrid system where elements of the ‘old’ model and new reform paradigms such as the NPM and digital government are hybridized, labelled the Neo Weberian State. The question will be addressed as to what extent this shift has taken shape and which hurdles and path-dependencies can be identified to explain partial persistence and continuity over time.
Geleitwort
(2020)
This book brings together a variety of innovative perspectives on the inclusion of gender in the governance of (counter-)terrorism and violent extremism.
Several global governance initiatives launched in recent years have explicitly sought to integrate concern for gender equality and gendered harms into efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism (CT/CVE). As a result, commitments to gender-sensitivity and gender equality in international and regional CT/CVE initiatives, in national action plans and at the level of civil society programming, ´have become a common aspect of the multilevel governance of terrorism and violent extremism. In light of these developments, there is a need for more systematic analysis of how concerns about gender are being incorporated in the governance of (counter-)terrorism and violent extremism and how it has affected (gendered) practices and power relations in counterterrorism policy-making and implementation.
Ranging from the processes of global and regional integration of gender into the governance of terrorism, via the impact of the shift on government responses to the return of foreign fighters, to state and civil society-led CVE programming and academic discussions, the essays engage with the origins and dynamics behind recent shifts which bring gender to the forefront of the governance of terrorism. This book will be of great value to researchers and scholars interested in gender, governance and terrorism.
The chapters in this book were originally published in Critical Studies on Terrorism.
Gender at the crossroads
(2023)
Since the early 2000s, the United Nations (UN) global counterterrorism architecture has seen significant changes towards increased multilateralism, a focus on prevention, and inter-institutional coordination across the UN’s three pillars of work. Throughout this reform process, gender aspects have increasingly become presented as a “cross-cutting” theme. In this article, I investigate the role of gender in the UN’s counterterrorism reform process at the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, or “triple nexus”, from a feminist institutionalist perspective. I conduct a feminist discourse analysis of the counterterrorism discourses of three UN entities, which represent the different UN pillars of peace and security (DPO), development (UNDP), and humanitarianism and human rights (OHCHR). The article examines the role of gender in the inter-institutional reform process by focusing on the changes, overlaps and differences in the discursive production of gender in the entities’ counterterrorism agendas over time and in two recent UN counterterrorism conferences. I find that gendered dynamics of nested newness and institutional layering have played an essential role both as a justification for the involvement of individual entities in counterterrorism and as a vehicle for inter-institutional cooperation and struggle for discursive power.
Gender at the crossroads
(2021)
Since the early 2000s, the United Nations (UN) global counterterrorism architecture has seen significant changes towards increased multilateralism, a focus on prevention, and inter-institutional coordination across the UN’s three pillars of work. Throughout this reform process, gender aspects have increasingly become presented as a “cross-cutting” theme. In this article, I investigate the role of gender in the UN’s counterterrorism reform process at the humanitarian-development-peace nexus, or “triple nexus”, from a feminist institutionalist perspective. I conduct a feminist discourse analysis of the counterterrorism discourses of three UN entities, which represent the different UN pillars of peace and security (DPO), development (UNDP), and humanitarianism and human rights (OHCHR). The article examines the role of gender in the inter-institutional reform process by focusing on the changes, overlaps and differences in the discursive production of gender in the entities’ counterterrorism agendas over time and in two recent UN counterterrorism conferences. I find that gendered dynamics of nested newness and institutional layering have played an essential role both as a justification for the involvement of individual entities in counterterrorism and as a vehicle for inter-institutional cooperation and struggle for discursive power.
The United Nations (UN) policy agenda on Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism (P/CVE) promotes a “holistic” approach to counterterrorism, which includes elements traditionally found in security and development programs. Advocates of the agenda increasingly emphasize the importance of gender mainstreaming for counterterrorism goals. In this article, I scrutinize the merging of the goals of gender equality, security, and development into a global agenda for counterterrorism. A critical feminist discourse-analytical reading of gender representations in P/CVE shows how problematic imageries of women as victims, economic entrepreneurs, and peacemakers from both the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the Women, Peace and Security agenda are reproduced in core UN documents advocating for a “holistic” P/CVE approach. By highlighting the tensions that are produced by efforts to merge the different gender discourses across the UN’s security and development institutions, the article underlines the relevance of considering the particular position of P/CVE at the security–development nexus for further gender-sensitive analysis and policies of counterterrorism.
This article contributes to the politics of policy‐making in executive government. It introduces the analytical distinction between generalists and specialists as antagonistic players in executive politics and develops the claim that policy specialists are in a structurally advantaged position to succeed in executive politics and to fend off attempts by generalists to influence policy choices through cross‐cutting reform measures. Contrary to traditional textbook public administration, we explain the views of generalists and specialists not through their training but their positions within an organization. We combine established approaches from public policy and organization theory to substantiate this claim and to define the dilemma that generalists face when developing government‐wide reform policies (‘meta‐policies’) as well as strategies to address this problem. The article suggests that the conceptual distinction between generalists and specialists allows for a more precise analysis of the challenges for policy‐making across government organizations than established approaches.
Germany has a long tradition of federalism extending far back in history (Ziblatt 2004; Broschek 2011). This tradition has always been characterized by a discrepancy between the attitudes of the public to its federalism and the reform ideas of the (political) elites. While the public has a strong desire for an equality of living conditions, solidarity, social cohesion, and cooperation between the orders of government, academic discourse is shaped by calls for wide-ranging federalism reforms, which are oriented toward the American model of "dual federalism." Against this background, this chapter contrasts public attitudes on key aspects of the federal system with long-lasting academic recommendations for reform. Light will be shed on the general perception of the federal system as a whole, the division of powers, and in particular the issue of joint decision-making (Politikverflechtung) between the orders of government-all issues that have been repeatedly interrogated in various surveys. A further aspect of these polls is the question of the extent to which solidarity or competition shall be realized between the federal and Land governments-a question that is highly controversial in politics and academia (especially in the fiscal equalization debate), though public perceptions are quite different.
This study evaluates the challenges, institutional impacts and responses of German local authorities to the COVID-19 pandemic from a political science point of view. The main research question is how they have contributed to combat the COVID-19 pandemic and to what extent the strengths and weaknesses of the German model of municipal autonomy have influenced their policy. It analyses the adaptation strategies of German local authorities and assesses the effectiveness of their actions up to now. Their implementation is then evaluated in five selected issues, e.g. adjustment organization and staff, challenges for local finances, local politics and citizen’s participation. This analysis is reflecting the scientific debate in Germany since the beginning of 2020, based on the available analyses of political science, law, economics, sociology and geography until end of March 2021.
German Public Administration
(2021)
The international community of public administration and administrative sciences shows a great interest in the basic features of the German administrative system. The German public administration with its formative decentralisation (called: administrative federalism) is regarded as a prime example of multilevel governance and strong local self-government. Furthermore, over the past decades, the traditional profile of the German administrative system has significantly been reshaped and remoulded through reforms, processes of modernisation and the transformation process in East Germany. Studies on the German administrative system should focus especially on
key institutional features of public administration;
changing relationships between public administration, society and the private sector;
administrative reforms at different levels of the federal system; and
new challenges and modernisation approaches, such as digitalisation, open government and better regulation.
Germany as a leading power
(2020)
The COVID-19 virus has hit Germany as unexpectedly as other European countries. For a few weeks, Germans thought that COVID-19 was an issue for Asian states and not for their country. Although Germany continues to be affected by the coronavirus, the situation is nowhere as dire as it was in Britain, Italy or Spain. The race to lift restrictions in Germany began in May, and by early June, the country may be back to normal. Germany, with its enormous financial resources and a well-equipped medical sector, appears to be better placed than other economies to weather the storm.
The chapter begins with a brief historical overview of Germany’s transition in the twentieth and twenty-first century from a transit and emigration country to one of immigration. The next part of this chapter looks at the challenges and problems facing German immigration policy within a multi-level federal system. Finally, the chapter gives an analysis of some of the trends in German migration policy since the refugee crisis in 2015, such as changes in the party system and in the concepts underlying migration policies to better manage, control and limit immigration to Germany.
Each year, donor countries spend billions of Euros on development cooperation. Not surprisingly, a large strand of research has emerged which examines the impact of development cooperation. A sub-discipline within this strand of the literature deals with the question of whether the impact or effectiveness of development cooperation depends on the quality of the recipient country's policy and institutional environment. Over hundreds of studies have assessed this question at the macro level. In so doing, most of these studies test whether a potential effect of aid on the growth of a recipient country’s gross domestic product (GDP) is conditional on the country's policy and institutional environment. However, even after decades of research and hundreds of studies, no conclusive result has been found. One of the main reasons for the inconclusive state of the literature is that most macro-level studies have to deal with a high risk of endogeneity, treat aid as nothing but a pure income transfer, and rely on low-quality GDP data. To solve these three methodical issues, some authors have started to change the analytical focus from the macro to the micro level. Thus, these authors assess the determinants for the performance of individual development projects instead of the determinants for an effect of aid on GDP. Yet, even though the number of studies focusing on the micro level has increased steadily over the last few years, the state of the literature on the determinants for the performance of development projects still contains multiple highly relevant research gaps. The present thesis seeks to address three of these research gaps. The first research gap addressed by this thesis is related to the specific type of development cooperation. So far, nearly all existing studies focus on projects by Multilateral Development Banks. Research on the determinants for the performance of bilateral development projects is still rare. Thus, even though donors pledge to implement effective development projects, there are hardly any micro-level studies on bilateral projects. So far, only three studies use a sample which includes bilateral projects. Yet, none of the three studies assess the determinants for the performance of bilateral technical development projects. The first paper in the present thesis (GIZ paper) seeks to address this research gap by assessing the determinants for the performance of projects by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), a bilateral state-owned aid agency active in the area of technical cooperation. The results of the paper indicate that some but not all of the existing theoretical arguments can be extended to bilateral technical projects as well.. For example, the level of market interventions in the recipient county only affects the performance of financial development projects, while the recipient country’s government capacity affects both technical and financial development projects. The paper also indicates that effects of determinants may vary among project sectors. The paper also highlights a dilemma of technical development cooperation. The countries with low government capacity are usually the ones most in need of technical cooperation projects. But, at the same time, they are also the countries in which these projects have the poorest performance The second research gap addressed by this thesis is related to one specific factor in the policy and institutional environment of recipient countries, namely corruption. This determinant is often cited as essential for project performance but has gained surprisingly little coverage in empirical studies. The few existing studies on the effect of corruption on project performance are inconclusive. Some find a statistically significant correlation, while others do not. Furthermore, so far, all existing studies use corruption perception indices as a measurement for corruption, despite the fact that these indices have well-known deficits when it comes to this research topic. One of these deficits is that such indices do not distinguish between different forms of corruption, even though it is likely that the effect of corruption will vary depending on the type of development project and form of corruption. The second paper in this thesis (Corruption paper) seeks to address this inconclusive state of the research while focusing on one specific form of corruption, namely bribery between private firms and public officials. The paper finds a small but statistically significant correlation between the corruption level and the performance of World Bank projects. The systematic effect of corruption on project performance confirms the need to consider the risk of corruption in the design and during the implementation of projects. Nonetheless, the relatively small effect of corruption and the low pseudo R-squareds advise not to overestimate the relevance of corruption for project performance. At least for the project level, the paper finds no indication that corruption is a primary obstacle to aid effectiveness. The third research gap addressed by this thesis is related to one specific sample, namely recipient countries of the International Development Association (IDA). The question of whether the policy and institutional environment affects project performance is of particular relevance for these countries, given that the World Bank's ratings on a country's policy and institutional environment decide how much IDA resources it receives. One core justification of such an allocation system is that it helps to steer more resources to places where they are most effective. However, so far, there is no conclusive empirical evidence for this statement. The only study specifically focusing on this topic, a study by the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank from 2010, has essential methodological limitations. The third paper of this thesis (CPR paper) seeks to address this research gap by testing whether a more refined analysis confirms the assumption of previous studies that the policy and institutional environment of IDA-recipient countries, measured by the Country Policy and Institutional Assessment ratings, has an effect on the performance of World Bank projects. Overall, neither the main regression models nor any of the robustness tests indicate a substantial correlation between the policy and institutional environment and project performance. Only for Investments Loans is the coefficient large enough to assume some effect. The overall results not only contradict the results of previous studies, but also raise strong doubts around one of the core justifications for the allocation system of the IDA. All three papers rely on a statistical large-N analysis of the performance ratings of individual development projects. These ratings are usually assigned based on the final evaluation of a project and indicate the merit or worth of an activity. The merit or worth of an activity itself is measured by criteria like relevance, effectiveness, and efficiency. In the case of the two papers on World Bank projects, the needed data stem from different databases of the World Bank. The relevant data for the GIZ paper are gathered from internal evaluation reports of the GIZ. Logistic regressions are applied as the main analytical tool. Overall, the three papers show that the policy and institutional environment of recipient countries matters for project performance, but only to a small degree and under certain circumstances. This result highlights that many researchers and practitioners tend to overestimate the role that the policy and institutional environment of recipient countries plays in project performance. Furthermore, the thesis shows that authors of future studies should consider possible interactions between project- and country-level determinants whenever possible, both in their theoretical arguments and statistical models. Otherwise, the debate on the determinants for project performance is at risk of degenerating into a statistics tournament without any connection to reality.
Governance abhors a vacuum
(2023)
International organisations have become increasingly contested resulting in worries about their decline and termination. While international organisation termination is indeed a regular event in international relations, this article shows that other institutions carry the legacy of terminated international organisations. We develop the novel concept of international organisation afterlife and suggest indicators to systematically assess it. Our analysis of 26 major terminated international organisations reveals legal-institutional and asset continuity in 21 cases. To further illustrate this point, the article zooms in on the afterlife of the International Institute of Agriculture in the Food and Agriculture Organization, the International Refugee Organization in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and the Western European Union in the European Union. In these three cases, international organisation afterlife inspired and structured the design of their successor institutions. While specific international organisations might be terminated, international cooperation therefore often lives on in other institutions.
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.
Green recovery
(2023)
This chapter reviews how the European Union has fared in enabling a green recovery in the aftermath of the Covid-19 crisis, drawing comparisons to developments after the financial crisis. The chapter focuses on the European Commission and its evolving role in promoting decarbonisation efforts in its Member States, paying particular attention to its role in financing investments in low-carbon assets. It considers both the direct effects of green stimulus policies on decarbonisation in the EU and how these actions have shaped the capacities of the Commission as an actor in the field of climate and energy policy. The analysis reveals a significant expansion of the Commission’s role compared to the period following the financial crisis. EU-level measures have provided incentives for Member States to direct large volumes of financing towards investments in climate-friendly assets. Nevertheless, the ultimate impact will largely be shaped by implementation at the national level.
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.
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.
This study examines how public policies affect parents' preferences for a more egalitarian division of paid and unpaid work. Based on the assumption that individuals develop their preferences within a specific policy context, we examine how changes in three policies affect mothers' and fathers' work-family preferences: the availability of high-quality, affordable childcare; the right to return to a full-time job after having reduced hours to part-time and an increase in the number of 'partner months' in parental leave schemes. Analysing a unique probability sample of parents with young children in Germany from 2015 (N = 1756), we find that fathers would want to work slightly fewer hours if they had the right to return to a full-time position after working part-time, and mothers would want to work slightly more hours if childcare opportunities were improved. Full-time working parents, moreover, are found to prefer fewer hours independent of the policy setting, while non-employed parents would like to work at least some hours. Last but not least, our analyses show that increasing the number of partner months in the parental leave scheme considerably increases fathers' preferences for longer and mothers' preferences for shorter leave. Increasing the number of partner months in parental schemes hence has the greatest potential to increase gender equality.
States, in their conflicts with militant groups embedded in civilian populations, often resort to policies of collective punishment to erode civilian support for the militants. We attempt to evaluate the efficacy of such policies in the context of the Gaza Strip, where Israel's blockade and military interventions, purportedly intended to erode support for Hamas, have inflicted hardship on the civilian population.
We combine Palestinian public opinion data, Palestinian labor force surveys, and Palestinian fatalities data, to understand the relationship between exposure to Israeli policies and Palestinian support for militant factions.
Our baseline strategy is a difference-in-differences specification that compares the gap in public opinion between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank during periods of intense punishment with the gap during periods when punishment is eased. Consistent with previous research, we find that Palestinian fatalities are associated with Palestinian support for more militant political factions. The effect is short-lived, however, dissipating after merely one quarter.
Moreover, the blockade of Gaza itself appears to be only weakly associated with support for militant factions. Overall, we find little evidence to suggest that Israeli security policies toward the Gaza Strip have any substantial lasting effect on Gazan support for militant factions, neither deterring nor provoking them relative to their West Bank counterparts.
Our findings therefore call into question the logic of Israel's continued security policies toward Gaza, while prompting a wider re-examination of the efficacy of deterrence strategies in other asymmetric conflicts.
Werner Krause and Christina Gahn argue that we need to pay more attention to how the media communicates the results of opinion polls to the public. Reporting methodological details, such as margins of error, can alter citizens’ vote choices on election day. This has important implications for elections around the world
Permanent income (PI) is an enduring concept in the social sciences and is highly relevant to the study of inequality. Nevertheless, there has been insufficient progress in measuring PI. We calculate a novel measure of PI with the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) and U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). Advancing beyond prior approaches, we define PI as the logged average of 20+ years of post-tax and post-transfer ("post-fisc") real equivalized household income. We then assess how well various household- and individual-based measures of economic resources proxy PI. In both datasets, post-fisc household income is the best proxy. One random year of post-fisc household income explains about half of the variation in PI, and 2-5 years explain the vast majority of the variation. One year of post-fisc HH income even predicts PI better than 20+ years of individual labor market earnings or long-term net worth. By contrast, earnings, wealth, occupation, and class are weaker and less cross-nationally reliable proxies for PI. We also present strategies for proxying PI when HH post-fisc income data are unavailable, and show how post-fisc HH income proxies PI over the life cycle. In sum, we develop a novel approach to PI, systematically assess proxies for PI, and inform the measurement of economic resources more generally.
This chapter operationalizes the three fundamental concepts of this study. It outlines what counts as authoritarian rule, it explains how to recognize dissent in non-democratic contexts, and it debates how to quantify repression in the shadow of the politicized discourse on human rights. First, the chapter opts to classify every political regime as authoritarian that fails to elect its executive or legislature in free and competitive elections. Second, the chapter proposes to see dissent through the lens of campaigns, i.e., series of connected contentious events that involve large-scale collective action and formulate far-reaching political demands. Finally, after some elaboration on the problems involved in measuring political repression reliably and validly, the chapter turns to rescaled versions of the Human Rights Protection Scores 2.04 and the V-Dem 6.2 political civil liberties index as indicators for violence and restrictions. This choice of indicators of repression is, finally, defended against three central objections: the separability of violence from restrictions, the so-called information paradox, and, finally, differences in the timing of violence and restrictions.
Using a novel agent-based model, we study how US withdrawal might influence the political process established by the Paris Agreement, and hence the prospects for reaching the collective goal to limit warming below 2 degrees C. Our model enables us to analyze to what extent reaching this goal despite US withdrawal would place more stringent requirements on other core elements of the Paris cooperation process. We find, first, that the effect of a US withdrawal depends critically on the extent to which member countries reciprocate others' promises and contributions. Second, while the 2 degrees C goal will likely be reached only under a very small set of conditions in any event, even temporary US withdrawal will further narrow this set significantly. Reaching this goal will then require other countries to step up their ambition at the first opportunity and to comply nearly 100% with their pledges, while maintaining high confidence in the Paris Agreements institutions. Third, although a US withdrawal will first primarily affect the United States' own emissions, it will eventually prove even more detrimental to other countries' emissions.
Human resource management (HRM) reform has not been the focus of attention in Germany despite its obvious relevance for effective policy implementation. Although there is a general trend worldwide towards convergence between public and private HRM strategies and practices, management of the workforce in German public administration still remains largely traditional and bureaucratic. This chapter describes and analyses German practices regarding the central functions and elements of HRM such as planning, recruitment, training and leadership. Furthermore, it explores the importance and contribution of public service motivation, performance-related pay and diversity management in the context of German practices. The chapter concludes by highlighting some of the major paradoxes of German public HRM in light of current challenges, such as demographic change, digital transformation and organisational development capabilities.
Extreme-right terrorism is a threat that is often underestimated by the public at large. As this paper argues, this is partly due to a concept of terrorism utilized by policymakers, intelligence agents, and police investigators that is based on experience of international terrorism perpetrated by leftists or jihadists as opposed to domestic extreme-right violence. This was one reason why investigators failed to identify the crimes committed by the National Socialist Underground (NSU) in Germany (2000–2011) as extreme-right terrorism, for example. While scholarly debate focused on the Red Army Faction and Al Qaeda, terrorist tendencies among those perpetrating racist and extreme-right violence tended to be disregarded. Influential researchers in the field of “extremism” denied that terrorist acts were committed by right-wingers. By mapping the specifics regarding the strategic use of violence, target selection, addressing of different audiences etc., this paper proposes a more accurate definition of extreme-right terrorism. In comparing it to other forms of terrorism, extreme-right terrorism is distinguished by its specific framework of ideologies and practices, with the underlying idea of an essential inequality that is compensated for through the affirmation of violence. It can be differentiated from other forms of extreme-right violence based on its use of strategic, premeditated and planned attacks against targets of a symbolic nature.
This study explores the theoretical and political potentials of Édouard Glissant’s philosophy of relation and its approach to the issues of borders, migration, and the setup of political communities as proposed by his pensée nouvelle de la frontière (new border thought), against the background of the German migration crisis of 2015. The main argument of this article is that Glissant’s work offers an alternative epistemological and normative framework through which the contemporary political issues arising around the phenomenon of repressive border regimes can be studied. To demonstrate this point, this article works with Glissant’s border thought as an analytical lens and proposes a pathway for studying the contemporary German border regime. Particular emphasis is placed on the identification of potential areas where a Glissantian politics of relation could intervene with the goal of transforming borders from impermeable walls into points of passage. By exploring the political implications of his border thought, as well as the larger philosophical context from which it emerges, while using a transdisciplinary approach that borrows from literary and political studies, this work contributes to ongoing debates in postcolonial studies on borders and borderlessness, as well as Glissant’s political legacy in the twenty-first century.
Immune to COVID?
(2021)
In the Shadow of Ukraine
(2022)
In 2022, India captured global attention over its response to the war in Ukraine. While calling for both parties' return to diplomacy, India abstained from several United Nations resolutions condemning Russian aggression. For a country that ostensibly subscribes to the values of democracy and territorial integrity, its response appeared frustrating and contradictory, but it is broadly consistent with its long-standing policy of non-alignment. Although India's relationship with China is increasingly contentious, New Delhi is not yet fully convinced that it is in India's interest to swing westwards. The country's relations with Russia and China are deep, complex and substantive. In addition to the military and economic benefits it derives from its connection with Russia, New Delhi and Moscow share an avowed preference for a more equal, multipolar world. India will eventually have to reflect on the extent to which it can sustain its balancing act.
Personal data increasingly serve as inputs to public goods. Like other types of contributions to public goods, personal data are likely to be underprovided. We investigate whether classical remedies to underprovision are also applicable to personal data and whether the privacy-sensitive nature of personal data must be additionally accounted for. In a randomized field experiment on a public online education platform, we prompt users to complete their profiles with personal information. Compared to a control message, we find that making public benefits salient increases the number of personal data contributions significantly. This effect is even stronger when additionally emphasizing privacy protection, especially for sensitive information. Our results further suggest that emphasis on both public benefits and privacy protection attracts personal data from a more diverse set of contributors.
This paper is concerned with the normative underpinnings of popular sustainability indicators and country rankings. Attempts to quantify national sustainability in the form of composite indicators and rankings have increased rapidly over past decades. However, questions regarding validity and interpretability remain. This article combines theoretical and statistical tools to explore how input variables in five popular sustainability indicators can be related to different theoretical paradigms: weak and strong sustainability. It is shown that differences in theoretical interpretations affect input variable selection, which in turn affects indicator output. This points towards the risk of indicators becoming a sort of ‘circular argumentation construct’. The article argues that sustainability indicators and country rankings must be treated as theoretical just as much as statistical instruments. It is proposed that making underlying normative assumptions explicit, and making input variable selection more clear in a theoretical sense, can enhance indicator validity and usability for policy makers and researchers alike.
Stochastic uncertainty can cause coordination problems that may hinder mutually beneficial cooperation. We propose a mechanism of ex-post voluntary transfers designed to circumvent these coordination problems and ask whether it can increase efficiency. To test this transfer mechanism, we implement a controlled laboratory experiment based on a repeated Ultimatum Game with a stochastic endowment. Contrary to our hypothesis, we find that allowing voluntary transfers does not lead to an efficiency increase. We suggest and analyze two major reasons for this failure: first, stochastic uncertainty forces proposers intending to cooperate to accept high strategic uncertainty, which many proposers avoid; second, many responders behave only incompletely conditionally cooperatively, which hinders cooperation in future periods.
The digitization has permeated almost all aspects of an individual’s life. In the work context as well as in the private sphere, one readily encounters and relies on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), such as Social Networking Sites (SNS), smartphones and so forth. By communicating with as well as obtaining information via such technologies, ICTs engage one’s mind as interaction happens. This interaction of ICTs and the human mind form the focal topic of this thesis. Within this thesis, the human mind is represented on behalf of a facilitated model comprising a perceptual, a cognitive and a motor subsystem. ICTs represent an external stimulus, which triggers the human mind's perceptual subsystem, the cognitive subsystem and eventually leads to a motoric response via the motor subsystem. The external stimulus causing this event chain is within this thesis an ICT. The digital environment and related ICTs are high attention environments offering large and easily accessible amounts of information. Not surprisingly, issues may arise, when the human mind deals with ICTs. Thus, the interplay between ICTs and the human mind entails downsides. This thesis investigates these downsides and in addition the ICT-based factors that cause these downsides. More specifically, the thesis investigates these two aspects as research questions in the context of SNSs as well as other ICTs (such as smartphones, e-learning etc.). Addressing the research questions, 8 articles are submitted within this thesis which address the topic with different methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods as well as systematic literature reviews. Article 1 investigates factors that lead to SNS fatigue and discontinuance intentions in a mixed-methods design. Article 2 explores if certain factors encountered on a newsfeed hamper sensemaking. Article 3 proposes a study design to explore the link between disorderly perceptions of a SNSs newsfeed and gender stereotype activations. Article 4 considers the interplay between users and algorithms via the newsfeed interface and the implications for relevance perceptions. Article 5 explores information acquisition, hampering factors and verification strategies of social media users. Article 6 systematically reviews addiction scales of various ICTs. Article 7 investigates click behavior in e-learning contexts and how this is linked to cultural and personality traits. Finally, article 8 offers a comprehensive overview of the antecedents and consequences of children’s smartphone usage. Within the specific context of SNSs, the thesis suggests that the cognitive tolls imposed on users’ minds cause adverse effects, such as impaired sensemaking, fatigue, stereotype activation as well as intentions to discontinue the service. Other ICTs lead to addiction, and i.e., smartphones evidence to cause cognitive impairments in children. Factors on the ICT side that promote these adverse effects are linked to specific features, such as the newsfeed for SNSs and entail overload or perceptions of disorder. The thesis adds theoretically to the understanding of downsides that arise from the interplay between human minds and ICTs. Especially, the context of SNSs is spotlighted and insights add to the growing body of literature on experiences and perceptions. For instance, one study’s result suggests that considering information organization is as important as merely decreasing overload perceptions from the users in countering adverse effects of SNS usage. Practically, the thesis emphasizes the importance of mindful interaction with ICTs. Future research is welcome to build on the exploratory investigations and may draw an even more holistic picture to enhance the interaction between ICTs and the human mind.