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Der Semi-Parlamentarismus beschreibt das Regierungssystem, in dem die Regierung von einem Teil des Parlaments gewählt wird und abberufen werden kann, von einem anderen Teil des Parlaments aber unabhängig ist. Beide Kammern müssen dabei der Gesetzgebung zustimmen. Dieses von Steffen Ganghof klassifizierte System ergänzt gängige Regierungssystemtypologien, wie sie beispielsweise von David Samuels und Matthew Shugart genutzt werden. Der Semi-Parlamentarismus ist der logische Gegenpart zum Semi-Präsidentialismus, bei dem nur ein Teil der Exekutive von der Legislative abhängt, während im Semi-Parlamentarismus die Exekutive von nur einem Teil der Legislative abhängt. Der Semi-Parlamentarismus verkörpert so ein System der Gewaltenteilung ohne einen exekutiven Personalismus, wie er durch die Direktwahl und Unabhängigkeit der Regierungchef:in im Präsidentialismus hervorgerufen wird. Dadurch ist der Semi-Parlamentarismus geeignet, Unterschiede zwischen Parlamentarismus und Präsidentialismus auf den separaten Einfluss der Gewaltenteilung und des exekutiven Personalismus zurückzuführen. Die Untersuchung des Semi-Parlamentarismus ist daher für die Regierungssystemliteratur insgesamt von Bedeutung. Der Semi-Parlamentarismus ist dabei kein rein theoretisches Konstrukt, sondern existiert im australischen Bundesstaat, den australischen Substaaten und Japan.
Die vorliegende Dissertation untersucht erstmals umfassend die Gesetzgebung der semi-parlamentarischen Staaten als solchen. Der Fokus liegt dabei auf den zweiten Kammern, da diese durch die Unabhängigkeit von der Regierung der eigentliche Ort der Gesetzgebung sind. Die Gesetzgebung in Parlamentarismus und Präsidentialismus unterscheidet sich insbesondere in der Geschlossenheit der Parteien, der Koalitionsbildung und dem legislativen Erfolg der Regierungen. Diese Punkte sind daher auch von besonderem Interesse bei der Analyse des Semi-Parlamentarismus. Die semi-parlamentarischen Staaten unterscheiden sich auch untereinander teilweise erheblich in der institutionellen Ausgestaltung wie den Wahlsystemen oder den verfügbaren Mitteln zur Überwindung von Blockadesituationen. Die Darstellung und die Analyse der Auswirkungen dieser Unterschiede auf die Gesetzgebung ist neben dem Vergleich des Semi-Parlamentarismus mit anderen Systemen das zweite wesentliche Ziel dieser Arbeit.
Als Fundament der Analyse habe ich einen umfangreichen Datensatz erhoben, der alle Legislaturperioden der australischen Staaten zwischen 1997 und 2019 umfasst. Wesentliche Bestandteile des Datensatzes sind alle namentlichen Abstimmungen beider Kammern, alle
eingebrachten und verabschiedeten Gesetzen der Regierung sowie die mit Hilfe eines Expert-Surveys erhobenen Parteipositionen in den relevanten Politikfeldern auf substaatlicher Ebene.
Hauptsächlich mit der Hilfe von Mixed-Effects- und Fractional-Response-Analysen kann ich so zeigen, dass der Semi-Parlamentarismus in vielen Aspekten eher parlamentarischen als präsidentiellen Systemen gleicht. Nur die Koalitionsbildung erfolgt deutlich flexibler und unterscheidet sich daher von der typischen parlamentarischen Koalitionsbildung. Die Analysen legen nahe, dass wesentliche Unterschiede zwischen Parlamentarismus und Präsidentialismus eher auf den exekutiven Personalismus als auf die Gewaltenteilung zurückzuführen sind.
Zwischen den semi-parlamentarischen Staaten scheinen vor allem die Kontrolle des Medians beider Parlamentskammern durch die Regierung und die Möglichkeit der Regierung, die zweite Kammer mitaufzulösen, zu entscheidenden Unterschieden in der Gesetzgebung zu führen. Die Kontrolle des Medians ermöglicht eine flexible Koalitionsbildung und führt zu höheren legislativen Erfolgsraten. Ebenso führt eine möglichst leichte Auflösungsmöglichkeit der zweiten Kammern zu höheren legislativen Erfolgsraten. Die Parteigeschlossenheit ist unabhängig von diesen Aspekten in beiden Kammern der semi-parlamentarischen Parlamente sehr hoch.
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.
Within the context of United Nations (UN) environmental institutions, it has become apparent that intergovernmental responses alone have been insufficient for dealing with pressing transboundary environmental problems. Diverging economic and political interests, as well as broader changes in power dynamics and norms within global (environmental) governance, have resulted in negotiation and implementation efforts by UN member states becoming stuck in institutional gridlock and inertia. These developments have sparked a renewed debate among scholars and practitioners about an imminent crisis of multilateralism, accompanied by calls for reforming UN environmental institutions. However, with the rise of transnational actors and institutions, states are not the only relevant actors in global environmental governance. In fact, the fragmented architectures of different policy domains are populated by a hybrid mix of state and non-state actors, as well as intergovernmental and transnational institutions. Therefore, coping with the complex challenges posed by severe and ecologically interdependent transboundary environmental problems requires global cooperation and careful management from actors beyond national governments.
This thesis investigates the interactions of three intergovernmental UN treaty secretariats in global environmental governance. These are the secretariats of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. While previous research has acknowledged the increasing autonomy and influence of treaty secretariats in global policy-making, little attention has been paid to their strategic interactions with non-state actors, such as non-governmental organizations, civil society actors, businesses, and transnational institutions and networks, or their coordination with other UN agencies. Through qualitative case-study research, this thesis explores the means and mechanisms of these interactions and investigates their consequences for enhancing the effectiveness and coherence of institutional responses to underlying and interdependent environmental issues.
Following a new institutionalist ontology, the conceptual and theoretical framework of this study draws on global governance research, regime theory, and scholarship on international bureaucracies. From an actor-centered perspective on institutional interplay, the thesis employs concepts such as orchestration and interplay management to assess the interactions of and among treaty secretariats. The research methodology involves structured, focused comparison, and process-tracing techniques to analyze empirical data from diverse sources, including official documents, various secondary materials, semi-structured interviews with secretariat staff and policymakers, and observations at intergovernmental conferences.
The main findings of this research demonstrate that secretariats employ tailored orchestration styles to manage or bypass national governments, thereby raising global ambition levels for addressing transboundary environmental problems. Additionally, they engage in joint interplay management to facilitate information sharing, strategize activities, and mobilize relevant actors, thereby improving coherence across UN environmental institutions. Treaty secretariats play a substantial role in influencing discourses and knowledge exchange with a wide range of actors. However, they face barriers, such as limited resources, mandates, varying leadership priorities, and degrees of politicization within institutional processes, which may hinder their impact. Nevertheless, the secretariats, together with non-state actors, have made progress in advancing norm-building processes, integrated policy-making, capacity building, and implementation efforts within and across framework conventions. Moreover, they utilize innovative means of coordination with actors beyond national governments, such as data-driven governance, to provide policy-relevant information for achieving overarching governance targets.
Importantly, this research highlights the growing interactions between treaty secretariats and non-state actors, which not only shape policy outcomes but also have broader implications for the polity and politics of international institutions. The findings offer opportunities for rethinking collective agency and actor dynamics within UN entities, addressing gaps in institutionalist theory concerning the interaction of actors in inter-institutional spaces. Furthermore, the study addresses emerging challenges and trends in global environmental governance that are pertinent to future policy-making. These include reflections for the debate on reforming international institutions, the role of emerging powers in a changing international world order, and the convergence of public and private authority through new alliance-building and a division of labor between international bureaucracies and non-state actors in global environmental governance.
Zwischen Modellierung und Stakeholderbeteiligung - Wissensproduktion in der Energiewendeforschung
(2023)
Die Dekarbonisierung des Energiesystems ist Teil der international im Rahmen des Pariser Klimaabkommens beschlossenen CO2-Minderungsstrategie zur Bekämpfung des Klimawandels. Nach den Verhandlungen und Beschlüssen der Klimaziele stehen politische Entscheider weltweit nun vor der Frage, wie sie diese erreichen können. Dies produziert eine hohe politische Nachfrage nach Wissen um die direkten und indirekten Effekte verschiedener Instrumente und potentiellen Entwicklungspfade einer Energiewende. Dieser gesellschaftliche Bedarf an wissenschaftlichen Antworten zu Lösungsoptionen wurde im Rahmen einer Klimafolgenforschung, genauer einer Klimapolitikfolgenforschung, aufgenommen. Der relativ neue Zweig einer Energiewendeforschung hat sich weltweit entwickelt, steht dabei allerdings vor der doppelten Herausforderung: Erstens befindet sich das Objekt der Forschung nicht im luftleeren Raum, sondern innerhalb ökonomischer, sozialer und politischer Zusammenhänge, hier gesellschaftliche Einbettung genannt. Denn die Frage, wie die Energiewende erreicht werden kann, wird auch außerhalb der Wissenschaft debattiert und stellt damit ein Aushandlungsfeld unterschiedlicher Interessen und Narrative dar. Zweitens befindet sich das zu untersuchende Objekt in der Zukunft, hier unter dem Terminus des strukturellen Nicht-Wissens zusammengefasst. Diese beiden Bedingungen führen dazu, dass konventionelle Methoden der empirischen Sozialforschung nicht greifen und eine Öffnung und Transformation der Wissenschaft in Hinblick auf neue Methoden vonnöten ist (Nowotny 2001, Ravetz 2006, Schneidewind 2013). In dieser Arbeit untersuche ich zwei Möglichkeiten, wie mit der Herausforderung, Wissen unter der Bedingung des strukturellen Nicht-Wissens und der gesellschaftlichen Einbettung zu produzieren, in der Energiewendeforschung umgegangen wird. Einerseits wird dies durch die Einbeziehung von Stakeholdern, also nicht-wissenschaftlicher Akteure, in den Forschungsprozess getan. Andererseits ist die Nutzung von komplexen ökonometrischen Modellen zur Berechnung von Implikationen und energiewirtschaftlichen Entwicklungspfaden zu einem zentralen Mittel der Wissensgenerierung in der Energiewendeforschung avanciert. Damit wird der als Problem verstandenen strukturellen Bedingung des Nicht-Wissens insofern begegnet, als dass die Ergebnisse von Stakeholder-Involvement und von Modellierungsarbeiten zweifelsohne neues Wissen zur Verfügung stellen. Uneinigkeit besteht jedoch darin, worüber dieses Wissen etwas aussagt: Sind es Interessen oder legitime Perspektiven, die Stakeholder in den Forschungsprozess einbringen und sind Modelle vereinfachte Darstellungen der Welt oder sind sie Ausdruck der Vorstellung des Modellierers?
Was bewegt Menschen dazu, freiwillig in einem Krieg zu kämpfen, obwohl ihr Heimatland nicht involviert ist? Warum riskieren sie in Konflikten weltweit ihr Leben für eine fremde Sache? Bedeutet das Fehlen institutioneller Strukturen, die den Akteuren klare Regeln und Verhaltensweisen vorgeben würden, immer eine Eskalation von Gewalt? Diese Studie hilft, das Phänomen freiwilliger Kombattanten zu verstehen. Am Fallbeispiel internationaler Kriegsfreiwilliger, die in den Jugoslawienkriegen der 1990er Jahre auf Seiten Kroatiens kämpften, macht Julia Ludwig zudem den Mehrwert einer Analyse kultureller Faktoren in der Gewaltforschung deutlich.
Der Untersuchungsgegenstand der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die Praxis der Europäischen Bürgerinitiative (EBI) nach Art. 11 Abs. 4 EUV, dem weltweit ersten und einzigen Instrument transnationaler, partizipativer und digitaler Demokratie. Im Mittelpunkt der Untersuchung steht die Frage, welchen Beitrag die EBI zur weiteren Demokratisierung der EU leisten kann und auf welche Art und Weise insoweit noch weitere Verbesserungen erzielt werden können. Nach zehnjähriger Anwendungspraxis von 2012 bis 2022 liegen inzwischen ausreichend empirische Daten vor, um den Forschungsgegenstand umfassend zu erforschen und das Instrument mit Blick auf seinen von den EU-Institutionen versprochenen Legitimations- und Demokratisierungsbeitrag bewerten zu können. Insbesondere wird das EBI-Verfahren in dieser Arbeit auf seine empirisch nachweisbare Nutzung, auf seine prozedurale Nutzerfreundlichkeit sowie auf seine politische wie rechtliche Wirkmächtigkeit untersucht. Zum Zwecke der korrekten Kategorisierung, Bewertung sowie der nutzerfreundlichen Ausgestaltung des EBI-Verfahrens werden Vergleiche mit Bürger- und Volksinitiativverfahren in den EU-Mitgliedstaaten sowie mit Bürgerbeteiligungsverfahren auf EU-Ebene vorgenommen. Den empirischen und komparativen Analysen werden eine historische Analyse über die Genese der EBI seit dem EU-Verfassungskonvent sowie theoretisch-normative Überlegungen und praktische Untersuchungen zu unterschiedlichen beteiligungszentrierten Demokratiemodellen vorangestellt, um die EBI einzuordnen und die Steigerungsmöglichkeiten ihres Demokratisierungsbeitrags zu erschließen. Letzteres zielt schließlich auf die Frage nach der prozeduralen Kombination und Kompatibilität der EBI mit demokratischen Innovationen aus dem Bereich der deliberativen und direkten Demokratie ab. Die Arbeit schließt mit einem Ausblick und unterbreitet umfassende EBI-Reformoptionen sowohl auf der primär- und sekundärrechtlichen als auch auf der informellen Ebene.
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.
Enacted in 2009, the National Policy on Climate Change (PNMC) is a milestone in the institutionalisation of climate action in Brazil. It sets greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets and a set of principles and directives that are intended to lay the foundations for a cross-sectoral and multilevel climate policy in the country. However, after more than a decade since its establishment, the PNMC has experienced several obstacles related to its governance, such as coordination, planning and implementation issues. All of these issues pose threats to the effectiveness of GHG mitigation actions in the country.
By looking at the intragovernmental and intergovernmental relationships that have taken place during the lifetime of the PNMC and its sectoral plans on agriculture (the Sectoral Plan for Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change for the Consolidation of a Low-Carbon Economy in Agriculture [ABC Plan]), transport and urban mobility (the Sectoral Plan for Transportation and Urban Mobility for Mitigation and Adaption of Climate Change [PSTM]), this exploratory qualitative research investigates the Brazilian climate change governance guided by the following relevant questions: how are climate policy arrangements organised and coordinated among governmental actors to mitigate GHG emissions in Brazil? What might be the reasons behind how such arrangements are established? What are the predominant governance gaps of the different GHG mitigation actions examined? Why do these governance gaps occur?
Theoretically grounded in the literature on multilevel governance and coordination of public policies, this study employs a novel analytical framework that aims to identify and discuss the occurrence of four types of governance gaps (i.e. politics, institutions and processes, resources and information) in the three GHG mitigation actions (cases) examined (i.e. the PNMC, ABC Plan and PSTM). The research results are twofold. First, they reveal that Brazil has struggled to organise and coordinate governmental actors from different policy constituencies and different levels of government in the implementation of the GHG mitigation actions examined. Moreover, climate policymaking has mostly been influenced by the Ministry of Environment (MMA) overlooking the multilevel and cross-sectoral approaches required for a country’s climate policy to mitigate and adapt to climate change, especially if it is considered an economy-wide Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC), as the Brazilian one is.
Second, the study identifies a greater manifestation of gaps in politics (e.g. lack of political will in supporting climate action), institutions and processes (e.g. failures in the design of institutions and policy instruments, coordination and monitoring flaws, and difficulties in building climate federalism) in all cases studied. It also identifies that there have been important advances in the production of data and information for decision-making and, to a lesser extent, in the allocation of technical and financial resources in the cases studied; however, it is necessary to highlight the limitation of these improvements due to turf wars, a low willingness to share information among federal government players, a reduced volume of financial resources and an unequal distribution of capacities among the federal ministries and among the three levels of government.
A relevant finding is that these gaps tend to be explained by a combination of general and sectoral set aspects. Regarding the general aspects, which are common to all cases examined, the following can be mentioned: i) unbalanced policy capabilities existing among the different levels of government, ii) a limited (bureaucratic) practice to produce a positive coordination mode within cross-sectoral policies, iii) the socioeconomic inequalities that affect the way different governments and economic sectors perceive the climate issue (selective perception) and iv) the reduced dialogue between national and subnational governments on the climate agenda (poor climate federalism). The following sectoral aspects can be mentioned: i) the presence of path dependencies that make the adoption of transformative actions harder and ii) the absence of perceived co-benefits that the climate agenda can bring to each economic sector (e.g. reputational gains, climate protection and access to climate financial markets).
By addressing the theoretical and practical implications of the results, this research provides key insights to tackle the governance gaps identified and to help Brazil pave the way to achieving its NDCs and net-zero targets. At the theoretical level, this research and the current country’s GHG emissions profile suggest that the Brazilian climate policy is embedded in a cross-sectoral and multilevel arena, which requires the effective involvement of different levels of political and bureaucratic powers and the consideration of the country’s socioeconomic differences. Thus, the research argues that future improvements of the Brazilian climate policy and its governance setting must frame climate policy as an economic development agenda, the ramifications of which go beyond the environmental sector. An initial consequence of this new perspective may be a shift in the political and technical leadership from the MMA to the institutions of the centre of government (Executive Office of the President of Brazil) and those in charge of the country’s economic policy (Ministry of Economy). This change could provide greater capacity for coordination, integration and enforcement as well as for addressing certain expected gaps (e.g. financial and technical resources). It could also lead to greater political prioritisation of the agenda at the highest levels of government. Moreover, this shift of the institutional locus could contribute to greater harmonisation between domestic development priorities and international climate politics. Finally, the research also suggests that this approach would reduce bureaucratic elitism currently in place due to climate policy being managed by Brazilian governmental institutions, which is still a theme of a few ministries and a reason for the occurrence of turf wars.
Why do exercises in collaborative governance often witness more impasse than advantage? This cumulative dissertation undertakes a micro-level analysis of collaborative governance to tackle this research puzzle. It situates micropolitics at the very center of analysis: a wide range of activities, interventions, and tactics used by actors – be they conveners, facilitators, or participants – to shape the collaborative exercise. It is by focusing on these daily minutiae, and on the consequences that they bring along, the study argues, that we can better understand why and how collaboration can become stuck or unproductive. To do so, the foundational part of this dissertation (Article 1) uses power as a sensitizing concept to investigate the micro-dynamics that shape collaboration. It develops an analytical approach to advance the study of collaborative governance at the empirical level under a power-sensitive and process-oriented perspective. The subsequent articles follow the dissertation's red thread of investigating the micropolitics of collaborative governance by showing facilitation artefacts' interrelatedness and contribution to the potential success or failure of collaborative arrangements (Article 2); and by examining the specialized knowledge, skills and practices mobilized when designing a collaborative process (Article 3). The work is based on an abductive research approach, tacking back and forth between empirical data and theory, and offers a repertoire of concepts – from analytical terms (designed and emerging interaction orders, flows of power, arenas for power), to facilitation practices (scripting, situating, and supervising) and types of knowledge (process expertise) – to illustrate and study the detailed and constant work (and rework) that surrounds collaborative arrangements. These concepts sharpen the way researchers can look at, observe, and understand collaborative processes at a micro level. The thesis thereby elucidates the subtleties of power, which may be overlooked if we focus only on outcomes rather than the processes that engender them, and supports efforts to identify potential sources of impasse.
In der vorliegenden Arbeit liegt der Fokus auf jungen russischsprachigen Jüdinnen und Juden, deren Eltern in den 90er Jahren des 20 Jahrhunderts nach Deutschland eingewandert sind. Im Rahmen dieser Studie wird der Bildungsweg dieser MigrantInnengruppe und deren Erfahrungen in Deutschland aus der biographischen Perspektive nachvollzogen. Der Fokus wird insbesondere auf die biographischen Lebenserfahrungen gelegt, d.h. die allgemeinen Lebensumstände, Hürden und Schwierigkeiten, die die jungen russischsprachigen Jüdinnen und Juden in Deutschland überwinden mussten, um auf ihrem Bildungsweg an ihr Ziel zu kommen. Des Weiteren werden die Rolle des sozialen Umfelds auf die Auswahl ihres Bildungsweges sowie ihre Zugehörigkeit und ihr Beitrag zur deutschen Gesellschaft beleuchtet. Ein weiteres Hauptaugenmerk dieser Arbeit liegt auf den gesellschaftlichen, politischen und familiären Rahmenbedingungen, die den BiographInnen den Zugang zum Bildungsweg ermöglichten.
Die in der Arbeit formulierten Forschungsfragen wurden mithilfe der interpretativen Sozialforschung, genauer, der fallrekonstruktiven Auswertung nach Gabriele Rosenthal beantwortet.
Über den biographischen Verlauf der Lebensgeschichte der jungen russischsprachigen Jüdinnen und Juden wurde deutlich, dass die BiographInnen in die säkulare Gesellschaft gehen müssen, um ihren Bildungsweg erfolgreich zu gestalten. Dort erfahren sie einen sehr starken Antisemitismus und sind diesem schutzlos ausgeliefert. Bei allen drei Interviewten wurde diese Erfahrung in der Schule gemacht, an einem Ort, an dem sie Schutz erfahren sollten. Diesen Anfeindungen begegneten sie auf unterschiedliche Weise und sie entwickelten verschiedene Handlungsstrategien. Einige BiographInnen setzen sich auf der intellektuellen Ebene bewusst damit auseinander, andere wiederum versuchen, nicht hinzuschauen und es zu ignorieren.
Des Weiteren wurde als Resultat der Untersuchung in einigen Fällen ein übereinstimmendes, in anderen ein nicht übereinstimmendes Passungsverhältnis zwischen elterlichen Vorstellungen und den Bildungswegen der jungen russischsprachigen Jüdinnen und Juden gefunden.
This thesis is analyzing multiple coordination challenges which arise with the digital transformation of public administration in federal systems, illustrated by four case studies in Germany. I make various observations within a multi-level system and provide an in-depth analysis. Theoretical explanations from both federalism research and neo-institutionalism are utilized to explain the findings of the empirical driven work. The four articles evince a holistic picture of the German case and elucidate its role as a digital government laggard. Their foci range from macro, over meso to micro level of public administration, differentiating between the governance and the tool dimension of digital government.
The first article shows how multi-level negotiations lead to expensive but eventually satisfying solutions for the involved actors, creating a subtle balance between centralization and decentralization. The second article identifies legal, technical, and organizational barriers for cross-organizational service provision, highlighting the importance of inter-organizational and inter-disciplinary exchange and both a common language and trust. Institutional change and its effects on the micro level, on citizens and the employees in local one-stop shops, mark the focus of the third article, bridging the gap between reforms and the administrative reality on the local level. The fourth article looks at the citizens’ perspective on digital government reforms, their expectations, use and satisfaction. In this vein, this thesis provides a detailed account of the importance of understanding the digital divide and therefore the necessity of reaching out to different recipients of digital government reforms. I draw conclusions from the factors identified as causes for Germany’s shortcomings for other federal systems where feasible and derive reform potential therefrom. This allows to gain a new perspective on digital government and its coordination challenges in federal contexts.
Der Verteidigungsausschuss des Deutschen Bundestags steht seit seiner Gründung in rationaler und emotionaler Auseinandersetzung mit Parlament und Öffentlichkeit. Wolfgang Geist untersucht in seiner Langzeitanalyse die wechselnde Stellung des Ausschusses im Bundestag und gegenüber dessen Fraktionen unter den sich wandelnden politischen und gesellschaftlichen Gegebenheiten. So wird deutlich, welche Rolle der Ausschuss – auch in seiner besonderen Tätigkeit als Untersuchungsausschuss – in der Sicherheitspolitik der Bundesrepublik spielte sowie welcher Bedeutung der personellen Zusammensetzung und einzelnen politischen Akteuren zukam. Gleichzeitig hinterfragt er das Schlagwort »Parlamentsarmee«.
This paper examines the function that cross-cultural competence (3C) has for NATO in a military context while focusing on two member states and their armed forces: the United States and Germany. Three dimensions were established to analyze 3C internally and externally: dimension A, dealing with 3C within the military organization; dimension B, focusing on 3C in a coalition environment/multicultural NATO contingent, for example while on a mission/training exercise abroad; and dimension C, covering 3C and NATO missions abroad with regard to interaction with the local population.
When developing the research design, the cultural studies-based theory of hegemony constructed by Antonio Gramsci was applied to a comprehensive document analysis of 3C coursework and regulations as well as official documents in order to establish a typification for cross-cultural competence.
As the result, 3C could be categorized as Type I – Ethical 3C, Type II – Hegemonic 3C, and Type III – Dominant 3C. Attributes were assigned according to each type. To validate the established typification, qualitative surveys were conducted with NATO (ACT), the U.S. Armed Forces (USCENTCOM), and the German Armed Forces (BMVg). These interviews validated the typification and revealed a varied approach to 3C in the established dimensions. It became evident that dimensions A and B indicated a prevalence of Type III, which greatly impacts the work atmosphere and effectiveness for NATO (ACT). In contrast, dimension C revealed the use of postcolonial mechanisms by NATO forces, such as applying one’s value systems to other cultures and having the appearance of an occupying force when 3C is not applied (Type I-II). In general, the function of each 3C type in the various dimensions could be determined.
In addition, a comparative study of the document analysis and the qualitative surveys resulted in a canon for culture-general skills. Regarding the determined lack of coherence in 3C correlating with a demonstrably negative impact on effectiveness and efficiency as well as interoperability, a NATO standard in the form of a standardization agreement (STANAG) was suggested based on the aforementioned findings, with a focus on: empathy, cross-cultural awareness, communication skills (including active listening), flexibility and adaptability, and interest. Moreover, tolerance of ambiguity and teachability, patience, observation skills, and perspective-taking could be considered significant. Suspending judgment and respect are also relevant skills here.
At the same time, the document analysis also revealed a lack of coherency and consistency in 3C education and interorganizational alignment. In particular, the documents examined for the U.S. Forces indicated divergent approaches. Furthermore, the interview analysis disclosed a large discrepancy in part between doctrine and actual implementation with regard to the NATO Forces.
Fördermittelfinanzierte Gründungsunterstützungsangebote waren in den EU-Förderperioden 2007-2013 und 2014-2020 ein wichtiges Element der Hochschulgründungsförderung im Land Brandenburg. Aufgrund der positiven wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung des Landes, reduzierte sich das Fördervolumen in der gleichen Zeit jedoch stetig. Für die EU-Förderperiode 2021-2027 steht eine weitere Reduzierung der Fördermittel bereits fest. In der Folge wird es, ohne Anpassungen der etablierten Förderstrukturen, zur weiteren Reduzierung oder Erosion der Gründungsunterstützungsangebote an Brandenburger Hochschulen kommen. Die vorliegende Arbeit befasst sich daher u.a. mit der Frage, wie ein theoretisches Referenzmodell zur fördermittelfinanzierten Hochschulgründungsberatung gestaltet sein kann, um den reduzierten Fördersätzen bei gleichzeitiger Aufrechterhaltung der Angebotsvielfalt gerecht zu werden.
Zur Beantwortung dieser Frage wird als Untersuchungsobjekt das Förderprojekt BIEM Startup Navigator herangezogen. Das Gründungsberatungsprojekt BIEM Startup Navigator wurde von 2010 bis 2014 an sechs Brandenburger Hochschulen durchgeführt. Mit Hilfe der Modelle und Prämissen der Prinzipal-Agent-Theorie wird zunächst ein theoretischer Rahmen aufgespannt, auf dessen Grundlage die empirische Untersuchung erfolgt. Anhand der Prinzipal-Agent-Theorie werden die beteiligten Organisationen, Individuen und Institutionen aufgezeigt. Weiterhin werden die wesentlichen Problemfelder und Lösungsansätze der Prinzipal-Agent-Theorie für die Untersuchung des BIEM Startup Navigators diskutiert.
Im Untersuchungsverlauf werden u.a. die Konzepte zur Durchführung des Förderprojekts an sechs Hochschulstandorten, die Daten von 610 Teilnehmenden und 288 Gründungen analysiert, um so sachlogische Zusammenhänge und Wechselwirkungen identifizieren und beschreiben zu können. Es werden unterschiedliche theoretische Annahmen zu den Bereichen Projekteffektivität bzw. Projekteffizienz, Kostenverteilung und zur konzeptionellen Ausgestaltung in Form von 24 Arbeitshypothesen formuliert und auf die Untersuchung übertragen. Die Verifizierung bzw. Falsifizierung der Hypothesen erfolgt auf Grundlage der kombinierten Erkenntnisse aus Literaturrecherchen und den Ergebnissen der empirischen Untersuchung.
Im Verlauf der Arbeit gelingt es, die in der Prinzipal-Agent-Theorie auftretenden Agencykosten auch am Beispiel des BIEM Startup Navigators zu beschreiben und ex post Ineffizienzen in den durchgeführten Screening- und Signalingprozessen aufzuzeigen.
Mit Hilfe des im Verlauf der Arbeit entwickelten theoretischen Referenzmodells zur fördermittelfinanzierten Gründungsberatung an Brandenburger Hochschulen soll es gelingen, den sinkenden EU-Fördermitteln, ohne eine gleichzeitige Reduzierung der Gründungsunterstützungsangebote an den Hochschulen, gerecht zu werden. Hierfür zeigt das theoretische Referenzmodell wie die Ergebnisse der empirischen Untersuchung genutzt werden können, um die Agencykosten der fördermittelfinanzierten Gründungsberatung zu reduzieren.
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"
Die Erzählungen der Energiewende: Erzählungen beherrschen die Interpretation des politischen Geschehens mehr als formal und methodisch strenge Argumentationsketten. Dies gilt insbesondere für Demokratien. In Demokratien gilt es zu überzeugen und auch zu überreden, um Macht zu erhalten, Macht zu sichern oder Akzeptanz für bestimmte politische Vorhaben zu generieren. Diese simple Feststellung lässt zwei Schlüsse für eine transformativ ausgerichtete Politikwissenschaft zu. Erstens können transformative Narrative produziert werden, die das Auftreten von ökologisch, sozial, ökonomisch und kulturell nachhaltigem wahrscheinlicher machen, Zweitens können die Narrative von nachhaltiger wie nicht-nachhaltiger Transformation analysiert werden. Beiden Aufgaben widmet sich die Dissertationsschrift. Dabei werden für den transformativen Teil ethnografisch erhobene Daten zu fünf transformativen Narrativen verdichtet, die Vorwärts- und Vorbildcharakter haben. In den fünf Aufsätzen wurde auf Diversität zwischen den beschriebenen Protagonisten geachtet, sodass eine breite Leser*innenschaft angesprochen wird. Im analytischen Part wird in einem Aufsatz über diese Vorgehen reflektiert und die Form beschrieben durch die transformative Narrative Wirksamkeit entfalten. Dabei gilt immer, dass die Wissenschaft keine Narrative selbst setzt, sondern mittels nachvollziehbarer Methoden Daten zum Sprechen bringt. Dies ist unter review-Bedingungen gelungen. Neben eines Einsatz von Narrativen in Fragen der Gestaltung der neu entstandenen und weiter entstehenden Energielandschaften behandelt diese Dissertationsschrift a, diskursstrangorientierte als auch institutionsorientierte Erzählungen über die Energiewende. Dabei wurden diskursstrangorientiert die unterschiedlichen Erzählungen der und über energieintensive Unternehmen bezüglich der EEG-Umlage untersucht und kategorisiert und die Metaphern der Energiewende im Magazin DER SPIEGEL erhoben und analysiert. Institutionsorientiert wurde die Energiewendeerzählung der Partei `Alternative für Deutschland´, die Bildsprache des Wirtschaftsministeriums an Hand eines Beispiels sowie die Nachhaltigkeitserzählungen der Zukunftsinstitut GmbH. Schließlich wird nach messbaren Folgen des Nachhaltigkeitsnarrativs in drei Regionen des Rhein-Maas-Gebiets gefragt, was die Arbeit abrunden soll.
‘The Territorialities of U.S. Imperialisms’ sets into relation U.S. imperial and Indigenous conceptions of territoriality as articulated in U.S. legal texts and Indigenous life writing in the 19th century. It analyzes the ways in which U.S. legal texts as “legal fictions” narratively press to affirm the United States’ territorial sovereignty and coherence in spite of its reliance on a variety of imperial practices that flexibly disconnect and (re)connect U.S. sovereignty, jurisdiction and territory.
At the same time, the book acknowledges Indigenous life writing as legal texts in their own right and with full juridical force, which aim to highlight the heterogeneity of U.S. national territory both from their individual perspectives and in conversation with these legal fictions. Through this, the book’s analysis contributes to a more nuanced understanding of the coloniality of U.S. legal fictions, while highlighting territoriality as a key concept in the fashioning of the narrative of U.S. imperialism.
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.
The Government will create a motivated, merit-based, performance-driven, and professional civil service that is resistant to temptations of corruption and which provides efficient, effective and transparent public services that do not force customers to pay bribes.
— (GoIRA, 2006, p. 106)
We were in a black hole! We had an empty glass and had nothing from our side to fill it with! Thus, we accepted anything anybody offered; that is how our glass was filled; that is how we reformed our civil service.
— (Former Advisor to IARCSC, personal communication, August 2015)
How and under what conditions were the post-Taleban Civil Service Reforms of Afghanistan initiated? What were the main components of the reforms? What were their objectives and to which extent were they achieved? Who were the leading domestic and foreign actors involved in the process? Finally, what specific factors influenced the success and failure Afghanistan’s Civil Service Reforms since 2002? Guided by such fundamental questions, this research studies the wicked process of reforming the Afghan civil service in an environment where a variety of contextual, programmatic, and external factors affected the design and implementation of reforms that were entirely funded and technically assisted by the international community.
Focusing on the core components of reforms—recruitment, remuneration, and appraisal of civil servants—the qualitative study provides a detailed picture of the pre-reform civil service and its major human resources developments in the past. Following discussions on the content and purposes of the main reform programs, it will then analyze the extent of changes in policies and practices by examining the outputs and effects of these reforms.
Moreover, the study defines the specific factors that led the reforms toward a situation where most of the intended objectives remain unachieved. Doing so, it explores and explains how an overwhelming influence of international actors with conflicting interests, large-scale corruption, political interference, networks of patronage, institutionalized nepotism, culturally accepted cronyism and widespread ethnic favoritism created a very complex environment and prevented the reforms from transforming Afghanistan’s patrimonial civil service into a professional civil service, which is driven by performance and merit.
In light of the debate on the consequences of competitive contracting out of traditionally public services, this research compares two mechanisms used to allocate funds in development cooperation—direct awarding and competitive contracting out—aiming to identify their potential advantages and disadvantages.
The agency theory is applied within the framework of rational-choice institutionalism to study the institutional arrangements that surround two different money allocation mechanisms, identify the incentives they create for the behavior of individual actors in the field, and examine how these then transfer into measurable differences in managerial quality of development aid projects. In this work, project management quality is seen as an important determinant of the overall project success.
For data-gathering purposes, the German development agency, the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), is used due to its unique way of work. Whereas the majority of projects receive funds via direct-award mechanism, there is a commercial department, GIZ International Services (GIZ IS) that has to compete for project funds.
The data concerning project management practices on the GIZ and GIZ IS projects was gathered via a web-based, self-administered survey of project team leaders. Principal component analysis was applied to reduce the dimensionality of the independent variable to total of five components of project management. Furthermore, multiple regression analysis identified the differences between the separate components on these two project types. Enriched by qualitative data gathered via interviews, this thesis offers insights into everyday managerial practices in development cooperation and identifies the advantages and disadvantages of the two allocation mechanisms.
The thesis first reiterates the responsibility of donors and implementers for overall aid effectiveness. It shows that the mechanism of competitive contracting out leads to better oversight and control of implementers, fosters deeper cooperation between the implementers and beneficiaries, and has a potential to strengthen ownership of recipient countries. On the other hand, it shows that the evaluation quality does not tremendously benefit from the competitive allocation mechanism and that the quality of the component knowledge management and learning is better when direct-award mechanisms are used. This raises questions about the lacking possibilities of actors in the field to learn about past mistakes and incorporate the finings into the future interventions, which is one of the fundamental issues of aid effectiveness. Finally, the findings show immense deficiencies in regard to oversight and control of individual projects in German development cooperation.
This study assesses and explains international bureaucracies’ performance and role as policy advisors and as expert authorities from the perspective of domestic stakeholders. International bureaucracies are the secretariats of international organizations that carry out their work including generating knowledge, providing policy advice and implementing policy programs and projects. Scholars increasingly regard them as governance actors that are able to influence global and domestic policy making. In order to explain this influence, research has mainly focused on international bureaucracies’ formal features and/or staff characteristics. The way in which they are actually perceived by their domestic stakeholders, in particular by national bureaucrats, has not been systematically studied. Yet, this is equally important, given that they represent international bureaucracies’ addressees and are actors that (potentially) make use of international bureaucracies’ policy advice, which can be seen as an indicator for international bureaucracies’ influence. Accordingly, I argue that domestic stakeholders’ assessments can likewise contribute to explaining international bureaucracies’ influence.
The overarching research questions the study addresses are what are national stakeholders’ perspectives on international bureaucracies and under which conditions do they consider international bureaucracies’ policy advice? In answering these questions, I focus on three specific organizational features that the literature has considered important for international bureaucracies’ independent influence, namely international bureaucracies’ performance and their role as policy advisors and as expert authorities. These three features are studied separately in three independent articles, which are presented in Part II of this article-based dissertation.
To answer the research questions, I draw on novel data from a global survey among ministry officials of 121 countries. The survey captures ministry officials’ assessments of international bureaucracies’ features and their behavior with respect to international bureaucracies’ policy advice. The overall sample comprises the bureaucracies of nine global and nine regional international organizations in eight thematic areas in the policy fields of agriculture and finance.
The overall finding of this study is that international bureaucracies’ performance and their role as policy advisors and expert authorities as perceived by ministry officials are highly context-specific and relational. These features vary not only across international bureaucracies but much more intra-organizationally across the different thematic areas that an international bureaucracy addresses, i.e. across different thematic contexts. As far as to the relational nature of international bureaucracies’ features, the study generally finds strong variation across the assessments by ministry officials from different countries and across thematic areas. Hence, the findings highlight that it is likewise important to study international bureaucracies via the perspective of their stakeholders and to take account of the different thematic areas and contexts in which international bureaucracies operate.
The study contributes to current research on international bureaucracies in various ways. First, it directly surveys one important type of domestic stakeholders, namely national ministry officials, as to how they evaluate certain aspects of international bureaucracies instead of deriving them from their structural features, policy documents or assessments by their staff. Furthermore, the study empirically tests a range of theoretical hypotheses derived from the literature on international bureaucracies’ influence, as well as related literature. Second, the study advances methods of assessing international bureaucracies through a large-N, cross-national expert survey among ministry officials. A survey of this type of stakeholder and of this scope is – to my knowledge – unprecedented. Yet, as argued above, their perspectives are equally important for assessing and explaining international bureaucracies’ influence. Third, the study adapts common theories of international bureaucracies’ policy influence and expert authority to the assessments by ministry officials. In so doing, it tests hypotheses that are rooted in both rationalist and constructivist accounts and combines perspectives on international bureaucracies from both International Relations and Public Administration. Empirically supporting and challenging these hypotheses further complements the theoretical understanding of the determinants of international bureaucracies’ influence among national bureaucracies from both rationalist and constructivist perspectives.
Overall, this study advances our understanding of international bureaucracies by systematically taking into account ministry officials’ perspectives in order to determine under which conditions international bureaucracies are perceived to perform well and are able to have an effect as policy advisors and expert authorities among national bureaucracies. Thereby, the study helps to specify to what extent international bureaucracies – as global governance actors – are able to permeate domestic governance via ministry officials and, thus, contribute to the question of why some international bureaucracies play a greater role and are ultimately able to have more influence than others.
Deutschland und Frankreich benötigen stetige Metallimporte, um ihr Wirtschaftsmodell aufrechtzuerhalten. Internationale Kooperation ist unerlässlich, damit diese Importe zuverlässig und nachhaltig verlaufen. Doch welche Potenziale bieten sich in diesem Bereich, welche Grenzen sind dabei zu erkennen? Dieser Frage geht Yann Wernert durch einen Fallstudienvergleich mit prozessanalytischen Methoden und auf der theoretischen Grundlage des neoliberalen Institutionalismus nach. Er zeigt, dass beide Länder ihre Bemühungen als reaktive Mittelmächte gestalten. Sie wollen durch staatliche Rohstoffstrategien wirtschaftliche, strategische und Nachhaltigkeitsziele erreichen. Während die Analyse durchaus Kooperationspotenziale ausmacht, fallen diese je nach Ländergruppe und Politikbereich sehr unterschiedlich aus.
Gesetzgebungsmehrheiten in parlamentarischen Systemen mit ihrem Dualismus aus Regierungslager und Oppositionsparteien bilden sich nicht frei. Vielmehr findet ihre Koordination in einem Spannungsfeld aus den programmatischen Positionen der Akteure und ihrem opportunistischen Wettbewerb untereinander statt. Diese Problematik bricht die Arbeit auf drei konkrete Fragestellungen herunter, im Rahmen derer sie die Konfliktmuster zwischen Akteuren bei der legislativen Mehrheitskoordination unter Mehrheitsregierungen in den deutschen Landesparlamenten untersucht: 1) Inwieweit hängt es von programmatischen Positionen oder vom opportunistischen Wettbewerb des Neuen Dualismus zwischen Regierungslager und Oppositionsparteien ab, ob Oppositionsparteien und Regierungslager bei der Bildung von Gesetzgebungsmehrheiten kooperieren oder konfligieren? 2) Inwieweit kommt es vor dem Hintergrund unterschiedlicher programmatischer Positionen und opportunistischer Überlegungen zu Konflikt statt Kooperation zwischen Koalitionsakteuren bei der Bildung gemeinsamer Gesetzgebungsmehrheiten? Letztere Fragestellung wird sodann auch in den Kontext des bundesrepublikanischen Kooperativföderalismus eingebettet: 3) Inwieweit geht die Bildung von Gesetzgebungsmehrheiten bei der Ausführung von Bundesgesetzen in Mischkoalitionen (bestehend aus Parteien, die sich auf Bundesebene in konkurrierenden Lagern gegenüberstehen) mit mehr Konflikt einher als in ebenenübergreifend kongruenten Regierungskoalitionen?
Theoretisch wird ein rationalistisches Modell der grundlegenden Handlungsanreize bei der Bildung von Gesetzgebungsmehrheiten in den deutschen Landesparlamenten erarbeitet. Auf dieser Basis beschäftigt sich die Arbeit damit, wie die Akteure strategisch programmatische und opportunistische Anreize zu Konflikt und Kooperation abwägen. Die Arbeit leitet dann konkrete Determinanten ab, die vorwiegend – aber nicht nur – mittels quantitativer Methoden getestet werden. Die Arbeit stützt sich dabei auf eine größtenteils neu zusammengestellte Gesetzgebungsdatenbank aus 3.359 Gesetzgebungsvorgängen aus 23 Legislaturperioden zwischen 1990 und 2013 in den Ländern Hamburg, Hessen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Nordrhein-Westfalen und Sachsen-Anhalt.
Die Analyse der Konfliktmuster zwischen Oppositionsparteien und Regierungslager zeigt, dass programmatische Distanz einer Oppositionspartei zum Regierungslager für Oppositionsverhalten eine Rolle spielt; dies gilt jedoch auch für opportunistische Aspekte (so lässt sich beispielsweise ein kompetitiveres Oppositionsverhalten beobachten, wenn nach der letzten Wahl ein vollständiger Regierungswechsel erfolgte). Oppositionsverhalten erscheint dabei recht kleinteilig ausgeprägt. Neben Unterschieden zwischen Legislaturperioden treten solche auch innerhalb von Legislaturperioden zwischen Akteuren sowie zwischen Gesetzentwürfen auf. Die Analyse generellen Koalitionskonflikts weist darauf hin, dass ein nicht unerheblicher Teil von Koalitionskonflikt strukturell bedingt ist. Handelt es sich bei einer gebildeten Regierungskoalition um die Wunschkoalition der beteiligten Parteien, so ist dies Koalitionskonflikt abträglich. Selbiges gilt für eine größere Mehrheitsmarge des Regierungslagers. Darüber hinaus ergeben sich Hinweise, dass die Ausführung von Bundesgesetzen unter Mischkoalitionen bei bundespolitischer Abgrenzung der Koalitionspartner mit mehr Koalitionskonflikt einhergeht als eine Ausführung unter kongruenten Koalitionen.
Der Beitrag der Arbeit ist polymorph angelegt. Sie hilft zunächst, die Strategien von Akteuren im Gesetzgebungsprozess besser zu verstehen. Als normativer Beitrag tritt auf einer zweiten Ebene die bessere Erforschung etwaiger nachteiliger Effekte des Neuen Dualismus unter Mehrheitsregierungen hinzu. Gleichzeitig soll die Arbeit drittens in der Zusammenschau helfen, die Mechanik der parlamentarischen Systeme in den Ländern selbst zu erhellen und besser normativ bewerten zu können. Hintergrund sind hier die jahrzehntealten Debatten um das beste Regierungssystem und -format der deutschen Länder als subnationale Entitäten. Die dritte Fragestellung dieser Arbeit konnte diese Debatte zudem mit einem neuen Aspekt bereichern. Wissen darüber, inwieweit die Ausführung von Bundesgesetzen in den Ländern je nach ebenenübergreifendem Koalitionsmuster in unterschiedlichem Ausmaß mit einem ‚coalition governance‘-Problem verbunden ist, fügt der Forschung zum föderalen Entscheiden in der Bundesrepublik eine neue und beachtenswerte Facette hinzu. Denn dabei handelt es sich um eine föderal bedingte mechanische Beeinträchtigung der Mehrheitskoordination in den Landesparlamenten selbst, die die potenziell gegebene föderale Flexibilität bei der Ausführung von Bundesgesetzen hemmt. Dies ebnet den Weg zu neuen Debatten darüber, wie in den deutschen Ländern mehr legislative Abstimmungsflexibilität ermöglicht werden kann als unter den bisher üblichen Mehrheits-Koalitionsregierungen.
On a small scale
(2018)
This study argues that micro relations matter in peacekeeping. Asking what makes the implementation of peacekeeping interventions complex and how complexity is resolved, I find that formal, contractual mechanisms only rarely effectively reduce complexity – and that micro relations fill this gap. Micro relations are personal relationships resulting from frequent face-to-face interaction in professional and – equally importantly – social contexts.
This study offers an explanation as to why micro relations are important for coping with complexity, in the form of a causal mechanism. For this purpose, I bring together theoretical and empirical knowledge: I draw upon the current debate on ‘institutional complexity’ (Greenwood et al. 2011) in organizational institutionalism as well as original empirical evidence from a within-case study of the peacekeeping intervention in Haiti, gained in ten weeks of field research. In this study, scholarship on institutional complexity serves to identify theoretical causal channels which guide empirical analysis. An additional, secondary aim is pursued with this mechanism-centered approach: testing the utility of Beach and Pedersen’s (2013) theory-testing process tracing.
Regarding the first research question – what makes the implementation of peacekeeping interventions complex –, the central finding is that complexity manifests itself in the dual role of organizations as cooperation partners and competitors for (scarce) resources, turf and influence. UN organizations, donor agencies and international NGOs implementing peacekeeping activities in post-conflict environments have chronic difficulty mastering both roles because they entail contradictory demands: effective cooperation requires information exchange, resource and responsibility-sharing as well as external scrutiny, whereas prevailing over competitors demands that organizations conceal information, guard resources, increase relative turf and influence, as well as shield themselves from scrutiny. Competition fuels organizational distrust and friction – and impedes cooperation.
How is this complexity resolved? The answer to this second research question is that deep-seated organizational competition is routinely mediated – and cooperation motivated – in micro relations and micro interaction. Regular, frequent face-to-face interaction between individual organizational members generates social resources that help to transcend organizational distrust and conflict, most importantly familiarity with each other, personal trust and belief in reciprocity. Furthermore, informal conflict mediation and control mechanisms – namely, open discussion, mutual monitoring in direct interaction and social exclusion – enhance solidarity and mutual support.
Die Republik Kosovo stellt einen Beitrittskandidaten sui generis in der Erweiterungsgeschichte der Europäischen Union dar. Die besonderen Beziehungen zwischen der EU und dem "potenziellen" Kandidaten resultieren aus dem ungelösten Territorialkonflikt mit Serbien, dem unvollendeten Staatsaufbau sowie der eingeschränkten Souveränität Kosovos. Diese Einzelfallstudie untersucht Kosovos Integrationsprozess in den Staatenverbund im Kontext der Spezifika des Beitrittsaspiranten, der stockenden EU-Südosterweiterung und der multiplen EU-Krise. Davon ausgehend werden vier Zukunftsszenarien für Kosovos Integrationsverlauf, auch mit Blick auf differenzierte Integrationsoptionen, entwickelt.
Neben der vorherrschenden Unternehmenskultur existieren innerhalb der Organisationen unterschiedliche Subkulturen. Eine solche Subkultur - die berufliche - ist im Kontext dieser Arbeit von Bedeutung. Ihr Einfluss auf das Individuum in Form einer sekundären Sozialisation fängt in der Regel noch vor dem Eintritt im Unternehmen an und kann je nach Dauer der Einflussnahme und Stärke der Unternehmens- und der Subkulturen unterschiedlich sein. Im Mittelpunkt des Buches steht die Untersuchung der Abhängigkeiten zwischen der beruflichen kulturellen Prägung der Mitarbeiter und dem Umgang mit Wissen im Unternehmenskontext. Das Buch bietet einen theoretischen Überblick über die relevanten Themenfelder, stellt die Entwicklung eines Modells der Interdependenzen zwischen Wissensmanagement, Unternehmenskultur und beruflicher Subkultur vor und diskutiert erste Ergebnisse zur empirischen Untersuchung der Interdependenzen sowie das hierzu entwickelte Instrument.
Dass sich die repräsentative Demokratie in Deutschland im Wandel befindet, ist nicht neu und kaum umstritten. Herausforderungen im Kontext der Partizipation und Repräsentation rufen ihrerseits Probleme auf Seiten der Input-Legitimation hervor. Demgemäß ist das grundlegende demokratiepolitische Anliegen dieser Arbeit, am Beispiel der Bundes- und Berliner Landesebene darzustellen, wie der repräsentative Politikprozess partizipativer und dennoch effektiv gestaltet werden kann. Basierend auf der philosophischen Strömung des Pragmatismus verfolgt und diskutiert die Arbeit die Synthese aus der pragmatistischen Demokratiekonzeption von Archon Fung und dem empirischen Forschungsprogramm der kriterienbasierten Evaluation demokratischer Innovationen. Dabei wird das analytische Vorgehen Archon Fungs kritisch erweitert, um dem dieser Arbeit zugrunde liegenden Konzept einer komplexen Bürgergesellschaft – als normativer und praktischer Bezugspunkt – gerecht zu werden. Fungs Konzept wird demnach um die liberale Sphäre der Öffentlichkeit, mithin um die zivilgesellschaftlichen Handlungszusammenhänge ergänzt. Auf Grundlage der Diskussion von demokratischen Innovationen werden schließlich demokratie- und engagementpolitische Handlungsempfehlungen in der Dimension der Partizipation und in der Dimension der Repräsentation formuliert. Mithin verfolgt die Arbeit eine problem- und lösungsorientierte Ergänzung der repräsentativen Demokratie. Gleichwohl ist die Arbeit als eine pragmatistisch angeleitete Konzeptstudie für die Entwicklung einer beteiligungsorientierten Praxis in der repräsentativen Demokratie zu verstehen, die trotz ihres theoretischen Charakters ganz im Sinne des Pragmatismus die notwendige empirische Orientierung aufweist. Damit wird das zuweilen problematische Verhältnis zwischen Politischer Theorie und empirischer Demokratieforschung überwunden.
In the past decades, development cooperation (DC) led by conventional bi- and multilateral donors has been joined by a large number of small, private or public-private donors. This pluralism of actors raises questions as to whether or not these new donors are able to implement projects more or less effectively than their conventional counterparts. In contrast to their predecessors, the new donors have committed themselves to be more pragmatic, innovative and flexible in their development cooperation measures. However, they are also criticized for weakening the function of local civil society and have the reputation of being an intransparent and often controversial alternative to public services. With additional financial resources and their new approach to development, the new donors have been described in the literature as playing a controversial role in transforming development cooperation. This dissertation compares the effectiveness of initiatives by new and conventional donors with regard to the provision of public goods and services to the poor in the water and sanitation sector in India.
India is an emerging country but it is experiencing high poverty rates and poor water supply in predominantly rural areas. It lends itself for analyzing this research theme as it is currently being confronted by a large number of actors and approaches that aim to find solutions for these challenges .
In the theoretical framework of this dissertation, four governance configurations are derived from the interaction of varying actor types with regard to hierarchical and non-hierarchical steering of their interactions. These four governance configurations differ in decision-making responsibilities, accountability and delegation of tasks or direction of information flow. The assumption on actor relationships and steering is supplemented by possible alternative explanations in the empirical investigation, such as resource availability, the inheritance of structures and institutions from previous projects in a project context, gaining acceptance through beneficiaries (local legitimacy) as a door opener, and asymmetries of power in the project context.
Case study evidence from seven projects reveals that the actors' relationship is important for successful project delivery. Additionally, the results show that there is a systematic difference between conventional and new donors. Projects led by conventional donors were consistently more successful, due to an actor relationship that placed the responsibility in the hands of the recipient actors and benefited from the trust and reputation of a long-term cooperation. The trust and reputation of conventional donors always went along with a back-up from federal level and trickled down as reputation also at local level implementation. Furthermore, charismatic leaders, as well as the acquired structures and institutions of predecessor projects, also proved to be a positive influencing factor for successful project implementation.
Despite the mixed results of the seven case studies, central recommendations for action can be derived for the various actors involved in development cooperation. For example, new donors could fulfill a supplementary function with conventional donors by developing innovative project approaches through pilot studies and then implementing them as a supplement to the projects of conventional donors on the ground. In return, conventional donors would have to make room the new donors by integrating their approaches into already programs in order to promote donor harmonization. It is also important to identify and occupy niches for activities and to promote harmonization among donors on state and federal sides.
The empirical results demonstrate the need for a harmonization strategy of different donor types in order to prevent duplication, over-experimentation and the failure of development programs. A transformation to successful and sustainable development cooperation can only be achieved through more coordination processes and national self-responsibility.
The thesis focuses on the inter-departmental coordination of adaptation and mitigation of demographic change in East Germany. All Eastern German States (Länder) have set up inter-departmental committees (IDCs) that are expected to deliver joint strategies to tackle demographic change. IDCs provide an organizational setting for potential positive coordination, i.e. a joint approach to problem solving that pools and utilizes the expertise of many departments in a constructive manner from the very beginning. Whether they actually achieve positive coordination is contested within the academic debate. This motivates the first research question of this thesis: Do IDCs achieve positive coordination?
Interdepartmental committees and their role in horizontal coordination within the core executive triggered interest among scholars already more than fifty years ago. However, we don’t know much about their actual importance for the inter-departmental preparation of cross-cutting policies. Until now, few studies can be found that analyzes inter-departmental committees in a comparative way trying to identify whether they achieve positive coordination and what factors shape the coordination process and output of IDCs.
Each IDC has a chair organization that is responsible for managing the interactions within the IDCs. The chair organization is important, because it organizes and structures the overall process of coordination in the IDC. Consequently, the chair of an IDC serves as the main boundary-spanner and therefore has remarkable influence by arranging meetings and the work schedule or by distributing internal roles. Interestingly, in the German context we find two organizational approaches: while some states decided to put a line department (e.g. Department of Infrastructure) in charge of managing the IDC, others rely on the State Chancelleries, i.e. the center of government.
This situation allows for comparative research design that can address the role of the State Chancellery in inter-departmental coordination of cross-cutting policies. This is relevant, because the role of the center is crucial when studying coordination within central government. The academic debate on the center of government in the German politico-administrative system is essentially divided into two camps. One camp claims that the center can improve horizontal coordination and steer cross-cutting policy-making more effectively, while the other camp points to limits to central coordination due to departmental autonomy. This debate motivates the second research question of this thesis: Does the State Chancellery as chair organization achieve positive coordination in IDCs?
The center of government and its role in the German politic-administrative system has attracted academic attention already in the 1960s and 1970s. There is a research desiderate regarding the center’s role during the inter-departmental coordination process. There are only few studies that explicitly analyze centers of government and their role in coordination of cross-cutting policies, although some single case studies have been published. This gap in the academic debate will be addressed by the answer to the second research question.
The dependent variable of this study is the chair organization of IDCs. The value of this variable is dichotomous: either an IDC is chaired by a Line department or by a State Chancellery. We are interested whether this variable has an effect on two dependent variables. First, we will analyze the coordination process, i.e. interaction among bureaucrats within the IDC. Second, the focus of this thesis will be on the coordination result, i.e. the demography strategies that are produced by the respective IDCs.
In terms of the methodological approach, this thesis applies a comparative case study design based on a most-similar-systems logic. The German Federalism is quite suitable for such designs. Since the institutional framework largely is the same across all states, individual variables and their effect can be isolated and plausibly analyzed. To further control for potential intervening variables, we will limit our case selection to states located in East Germany, because the demographic situation is most problematic in the Eastern part of Germany, i.e. there is a equal problem pressure. Consequently, we will analyze five cases: Thuringia, Saxony-Anhalt (line department) and Brandenburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Saxony (State Chancellery).
There is no grand coordination theory that is ready to be applied to our case studies. Therefore, we need to tailor our own approach. Our assumption is that the individual chair organization has an effect on the coordination process and output of IDCs, although all cases are embedded in the same institutional setting, i.e. the German politico-administrative system. Therefore, we need an analytical approach than incorporates institutionalist and agency-based arguments. Therefore, this thesis will utilize Actor-Centered Institutionalism (ACI). Broadly speaking, ACI conceptualizes actors’ behavior as influenced - but not fully determined - by institutions. Since ACI is rather abstract we need to adapt it for the purpose of this thesis. Line Departments and State Chancelleries will be modeled as distinct actors with different action orientations and capabilities to steer the coordination process. However, their action is embedded within the institutional context of governments, which we will conceptualize as being comprised of regulative (formal rules) and normative (social norms) elements.
Translating innovation
(2017)
This doctoral thesis studies the process of innovation adoption in public administrations, addressing the research question of how an innovation is translated to a local context. The study empirically explores Design Thinking as a new problem-solving approach introduced by a federal government organisation in Singapore. With a focus on user-centeredness, collaboration and iteration Design Thinking seems to offer a new way to engage recipients and other stakeholders of public services as well as to re-think the policy design process from a user’s point of view. Pioneered in the private sector, early adopters of the methodology include civil services in Australia, Denmark, the United Kingdom, the United States as well as Singapore. Hitherto, there is not much evidence on how and for which purposes Design Thinking is used in the public sector.
For the purpose of this study, innovation adoption is framed in an institutionalist perspective addressing how concepts are translated to local contexts. The study rejects simplistic views of the innovation adoption process, in which an idea diffuses to another setting without adaptation. The translation perspective is fruitful because it captures the multidimensionality and ‘messiness’ of innovation adoption. More specifically, the overall research question addressed in this study is: How has Design Thinking been translated to the local context of the public sector organisation under investigation? And from a theoretical point of view: What can we learn from translation theory about innovation adoption processes?
Moreover, there are only few empirical studies of organisations adopting Design Thinking and most of them focus on private organisations. We know very little about how Design Thinking is embedded in public sector organisations. This study therefore provides further empirical evidence of how Design Thinking is used in a public sector organisation, especially with regards to its application to policy work which has so far been under-researched.
An exploratory single case study approach was chosen to provide an in-depth analysis of the innovation adoption process. Based on a purposive, theory-driven sampling approach, a Singaporean Ministry was selected because it represented an organisational setting in which Design Thinking had been embedded for several years, making it a relevant case with regard to the research question. Following a qualitative research design, 28 semi-structured interviews (45-100 minutes) with employees and managers were conducted. The interview data was triangulated with observations and documents, collected during a field research research stay in Singapore.
The empirical study of innovation adoption in a single organisation focused on the intra-organisational perspective, with the aim to capture the variations of translation that occur during the adoption process. In so doing, this study opened the black box often assumed in implementation studies. Second, this research advances translation studies not only by showing variance, but also by deriving explanatory factors. The main differences in the translation of Design Thinking occurred between service delivery and policy divisions, as well as between the first adopter and the rest of the organisation. For the intra-organisational translation of Design Thinking in the Singaporean Ministry the following five factors played a role: task type, mode of adoption, type of expertise, sequence of adoption, and the adoption of similar practices.
Das Buch bietet eine systematische Erklärung der bisher wenig beachteten Phänomene von Wandel und Stabilität legislativer Vetopunkte (VP) in parlamentarischen Demokratien.
Theoretisch ermöglichen die gemeinsame Betrachtung der Akteursstrategien auf Gesetzgebungs- und Reformebene und deren gegenseitige Beeinflussung die Identifikation institutioneller Gleichgewichte. Die Erklärung der Autorin betont die Bedeutung der Mehrheiten beschränkenden Wirkung von Vetoinstitutionen für die Reformpräferenzen der Akteure. Im Reformprozess wird die Legitimität der Vetopunkte als wesentlicher Faktor angenommen. Sie beeinflusst Kosten und Nutzen der Akteure durch eine potenzielle elektorale Bestrafung von Versuchen, legitime Vetopunkte zu schwächen bzw. illegitime Vetopunkte zu bewahren.
Empirisch wird die Erklärung mittels einer QCA–Analyse für 38 etablierte parlamentarische Demokratien sowie anhand vertiefender Fallstudien zur Entwicklung der Vetoinstitutionen in fünf Ländern überprüft.
Die Empirie des beginnenden 21. Jahrhunderts weist mehr autoritäre Regime aus als am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts angenommen. Die gegenwärtige Autoritarismusforschung versucht die Fortdauer dieses Regimetyps in Hinblick auf die politischen Institutionen zu erklären – dabei bleiben politische Akteure, die nicht zum Herrschaftszentrum gehören, außen vor.
Das vorliegende Projekt untersucht die Rolle und Funktion politischer Opposition in autoritären Regimen. Es wird davon ausgegangen, dass sich an der Opposition eine signifikante Charakteristik autoritärer Regime manifestiert. Das akteurszentrierte Projekt ist der qualitativ orientierten Politikwissenschaft zuzurechnen und verknüpft das Autoritarismuskonzept von Juan Linz mit klassischen Ansätzen der Oppositionsforschung und macht diese Theorien für die gegenwärtige Autoritarismusforschung nutzbar.
Die eigens entwickelte elitenorientierte Oppositionstypologie wird am Beispiel Kenias im Zeitraum 1990-2005 angewendet. Die Oppositionsgruppen werden im Institutionengefüge autoritärer Regime verortet und ihr politisches Agieren in den Dimensionen Handlungsstatus, Handlungsüberzeugung und Handlungsstrategie analysiert. Unter Beachtung der historisch gewachsenen regionalen und kulturellen Spezifika wird angenommen, dass generelle, Regionen übergreifende Aussagen zur Opposition in autoritären Regimen getroffen werden können: Kein Oppositionstyp kann allein einen Herrschaftswechsel bewirken. Der Wechsel bzw. die Fortdauer der Herrschaft hängt von der Dominanz bestimmter Oppositionstypen im Oppositionsgeflecht sowie der gleichzeitigen Schwäche anderer Oppositionstypen ab.
Durch die konzeptionelle Beschäftigung mit Opposition sowie deren empirische Erschließung soll ein substantieller Beitrag für die notwendige Debatte um autoritäre Regime im 21. Jahrhundert geleistet werden.
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.
Seit Jahren steigen Politikverdrossenheit und die Zahl der Menschen an, die sich von der Gesellschaft exkludiert fühlen. Können Basisaktivierung durch Quartiersmanagement und Community Organizing diesen Trends entgegenwirken? Fördert die Ermöglichung der gesellschaftlichen Teilhabe von benachteiligten Bevölkerungsgruppen die Sozialkapitalbildung im Sinne Putnams? Um diese Fragen zu beantworten, wurden die vorhandene Literatur analysiert und zahlreiche Experteninterviews geführt.
Bad governance causes economic, social, developmental and environmental problems in many developing countries. Developing countries have adopted a number of reforms that have assisted in achieving good governance. The success of governance reform depends on the starting point of each country – what institutional arrangements exist at the out-set and who the people implementing reforms within the existing institutional framework are. This dissertation focuses on how formal institutions (laws and regulations) and informal institutions (culture, habit and conception) impact on good governance. Three characteristics central to good governance - transparency, participation and accountability are studied in the research.
A number of key findings were: Good governance in Hanoi and Berlin represent the two extremes of the scale, while governance in Berlin is almost at the top of the scale, governance in Hanoi is at the bottom. Good governance in Hanoi is still far from achieved. In Berlin, information about public policies, administrative services and public finance is available, reliable and understandable. People do not encounter any problems accessing public information. In Hanoi, however, public information is not easy to access. There are big differences between Hanoi and Berlin in the three forms of participation. While voting in Hanoi to elect local deputies is formal and forced, elections in Berlin are fair and free. The candidates in local elections in Berlin come from different parties, whereas the candidacy of local deputies in Hanoi is thoroughly controlled by the Fatherland Front. Even though the turnout of voters in local deputy elections is close to 90 percent in Hanoi, the legitimacy of both the elections and the process of representation is non-existent because the local deputy candidates are decided by the Communist Party.
The involvement of people in solving local problems is encouraged by the government in Berlin. The different initiatives include citizenry budget, citizen activity, citizen initiatives, etc. Individual citizens are free to participate either individually or through an association.
Lacking transparency and participation, the quality of public service in Hanoi is poor. Citizens seldom get their services on time as required by the regulations. Citizens who want to receive public services can bribe officials directly, use the power of relationships, or pay a third person – the mediator ("Cò" - in Vietnamese).
In contrast, public service delivery in Berlin follows the customer-orientated principle. The quality of service is high in relation to time and cost. Paying speed money, bribery and using relationships to gain preferential public service do not exist in Berlin.
Using the examples of Berlin and Hanoi, it is clear to see how transparency, participation and accountability are interconnected and influence each other. Without a free and fair election as well as participation of non-governmental organisations, civil organisations, and the media in political decision-making and public actions, it is hard to hold the Hanoi local government accountable.
The key differences in formal institutions (regulative and cognitive) between Berlin and Hanoi reflect the three main principles: rule of law vs. rule by law, pluralism vs. monopoly Party in politics and social market economy vs. market economy with socialist orientation.
In Berlin the logic of appropriateness and codes of conduct are respect for laws, respect of individual freedom and ideas and awareness of community development. People in Berlin take for granted that public services are delivered to them fairly. Ideas such as using money or relationships to shorten public administrative procedures do not exist in the mind of either public officials or citizens.
In Hanoi, under a weak formal framework of good governance, new values and norms (prosperity, achievement) generated in the economic transition interact with the habits of the centrally-planned economy (lying, dependence, passivity) and traditional values (hierarchy, harmony, family, collectivism) influence behaviours of those involved.
In Hanoi “doing the right thing” such as compliance with law doesn’t become “the way it is”.
The unintended consequence of the deliberate reform actions of the Party is the prevalence of corruption. The socialist orientation seems not to have been achieved as the gap between the rich and the poor has widened.
Good governance is not achievable if citizens and officials are concerned only with their self-interest. State and society depend on each other. Theoretically to achieve good governance in Hanoi, institutions (formal and informal) able to create good citizens, officials and deputies should be generated. Good citizens are good by habit rather than by nature.
The rule of law principle is necessary for the professional performance of local administrations and People’s Councils. When the rule of law is applied consistently, the room for informal institutions to function will be reduced.
Promoting good governance in Hanoi is dependent on the need and desire to change the government and people themselves. Good governance in Berlin can be seen to be the result of the efforts of the local government and citizens after a long period of development and continuous adjustment.
Institutional transformation is always a long and complicated process because the change in formal regulations as well as in the way they are implemented may meet strong resistance from the established practice. This study has attempted to point out the weaknesses of the institutions of Hanoi and has identified factors affecting future development towards good governance. But it is not easy to determine how long it will take to change the institutional setting of Hanoi in order to achieve good governance.
This cumulative dissertation contains four self-contained articles which are related to EU regional policy and its structural funds as the overall research topic. In particular, the thesis addresses the question if EU regional policy interventions can at all be scientifically justified and legitimated on theoretical and empirical grounds from an economics point of view. The first two articles of the thesis (“The EU structural funds as a means to hamper migration” and “Internal migration and EU regional policy transfer payments: a panel data analysis for 28 EU member countries”) enter into one particular aspect of the debate regarding the justification and legitimisation of EU regional policy. They theoretically and empirically analyse as to whether regional policy or the market force of the free flow of labour (migration) in the internal European market is the better instrument to improve and harmonise the living and working conditions of EU citizens. Based on neoclassical market failure theory, the first paper argues that the structural funds of the EU are inhibiting internal migration, which is one of the key measures in achieving convergence among the nations in the single European market. It becomes clear that European regional policy aiming at economic growth and cohesion among the member states cannot be justified and legitimated if the structural funds hamper instead of promote migration. The second paper, however, shows that the empirical evidence on the migration and regional policy nexus is not unambiguous, i.e. different empirical investigations show that EU structural funds hamper and promote EU internal migration. Hence, the question of the scientific justification and legitimisation of EU regional policy cannot be readily and unambiguously answered on empirical grounds. This finding is unsatisfying but is in line with previous theoretical and empirical literature. That is why, I take a step back and reconsider the theoretical beginnings of the thesis, which took for granted neoclassical market failure theory as the starting point for the positive explanation as well as the normative justification and legitimisation of EU regional policy. The third article of the thesis (“EU regional policy: theoretical foundations and policy conclusions revisited”) deals with the theoretical explanation and legitimisation of EU regional policy as well as the policy recommendations given to EU regional policymakers deduced from neoclassical market failure theory. The article elucidates that neoclassical market failure is a normative concept, which justifies and legitimates EU regional policy based on a political and thus subjective goal or value-judgement. It can neither be used, therefore, to give a scientifically positive explanation of the structural funds nor to obtain objective and practically applicable policy instruments. Given this critique of neoclassical market failure theory, the third paper consequently calls into question the widely prevalent explanation and justification of EU regional policy given in static neoclassical equilibrium economics. It argues that an evolutionary non-equilibrium economics perspective on EU regional policy is much more appropriate to provide a realistic understanding of one of the largest policies conducted by the EU. However, this does neither mean that evolutionary economic theory can be unreservedly seen as the panacea to positively explain EU regional policy nor to derive objective policy instruments for EU regional policymakers. This issue is discussed in the fourth article of the thesis (“Market failure vs. system failure as a rationale for economic policy? A critique from an evolutionary perspective”). This article reconsiders the explanation of economic policy from an evolutionary economics perspective. It contrasts the neoclassical equilibrium notions of market and government failure with the dominant evolutionary neo-Schumpeterian and Austrian-Hayekian perceptions. Based on this comparison, the paper criticises the fact that neoclassical failure reasoning still prevails in non-equilibrium evolutionary economics when economic policy issues are examined. This is surprising, since proponents of evolutionary economics usually view their approach as incompatible with its neoclassical counterpart. The paper therefore argues that in order to prevent the otherwise fruitful and more realistic evolutionary approach from undermining its own criticism of neoclassical economics and to create a consistent as well as objective evolutionary policy framework, it is necessary to eliminate the equilibrium spirit. Taken together, the main finding of this thesis is that European regional policy and its structural funds can neither theoretically nor empirically be justified and legitimated from an economics point of view. Moreover, the thesis finds that the prevalent positive and instrumental explanation of EU regional policy given in the literature needs to be reconsidered, because these theories can neither scientifically explain the emergence and development of this policy nor are they appropriate to derive objective and scientific policy instruments for EU regional policymakers.
Die Annäherung von Entwicklung und Sicherheit seit Beginn der 1990er Jahre gilt in Teilen der Fachöffentlichkeit als wesentliches Merkmal einer zunehmenden Eigennutz- und Interessenorientierung der deutschen Entwicklungspolitik nach Ende des Ost-West-Konflikts. Den Ausgangspunkt der vorliegenden Untersuchung bildete die Skepsis gegenüber diesem Befund eines Wandels deutscher Entwicklungspolitik weg von moralischen Begründungszusammenhängen und hin zu nationaler Interessenpolitik seit Beginn der 1990er Jahre. Diese Skepsis begründet sich in der Annahme, dass die bisherige Kritik gegenüber einer möglichen Versicherheitlichung von Entwicklungspolitik die Rolle von eigennutzorientierten Interessen als erklärendem Faktor überbetont und gleichzeitig ideellen Strukturen und deren möglichem Wandel als konstitutivem Faktor für politische Prozesse zu wenig Aufmerksamkeit schenkt. Die Forschungsfrage lautet dementsprechend: Kann die deutsche Entwicklungspolitik im Lichte der Verknüpfung von Entwicklung und Sicherheit als zunehmend interessenorientiert gedeutet werden und hat sich damit ein grundlegender Politikwandel vollzogen?
Theoretisch knüpft die Arbeit an die konstruktivistisch-orientierte Forschung im Thema Entwicklung und Sicherheit an und entwickelt diese weiter. Für die Herleitung der theoretischen Position wird auf konstruktivistische Überlegungen in den Theorien der Internationalen Beziehungen rekurriert. Im Vordergrund stehen dabei jene Ansätze der Internationalen Beziehungen, die die konstruktivistische Wende nicht nur ontologisch, sondern auch epistemologisch vollziehen und der Rolle von Sprache besondere Aufmerksamkeit schenken. In empirischer Hinsicht wird die Verknüpfung von Entwicklung und Sicherheit in der deutschen staatlichen Entwicklungspolitik anhand von Interpretationen dieser Verknüpfung im Agenda-Setting und in der Politikformulierung untersucht. Der Untersuchungszeitraum der empirischen Analyse beläuft sich auf die Amtsjahre der SPD-Politikerin Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul als Bundesministerin für wirtschaftliche Entwicklung und Zusammenarbeit, nämlich 1998 2009. Der Datenkorpus der Untersuchung in Agenda-Setting und Politikformulierung umfasst über 50 Reden von Mitgliedern der Bundesregierung sowie ausgewählte offizielle Politikdokumente, in denen relevante Textpassagen enthalten sind. Die beispielhafte Untersuchung der Institutionalisierung im Lichte der Verknüpfungen von Entwicklung und Sicherheit bezieht sich auf weitere Primär- und Sekundärquellen.
Auf der Grundlage der empirischen Analyse wird deutlich, dass unterschiedliche Interpretationen in der staatlichen deutschen Entwicklungspolitik hinsichtlich der Verknüpfung von Entwicklung und Sicherheit über den Untersuchungszeitraum 1998 - 2009 nachgezeichnet werden können. Bemerkenswert ist dabei insbesondere die diffuse Vielfalt der Konstruktionen des Sicherheitsbegriffs. Außerdem wird anhand der empirischen Untersuchung nachgezeichnet, dass zum Teil erhebliche Unterschiede bestehen zwischen den Verknüpfungen von Entwicklung und Sicherheit auf der ressortübergreifenden Ebene einerseits und der entwicklungspolitischen Ebene andererseits. Auch die beispielhafte Diskussion von Meilensteinen der institutionalisierten Entwicklungspolitik bestätigt diese Varianzen, die durch die nuancierte Analyse sprachlicher Konstruktionen sichtbar gemacht werden konnte. Ausgehend vom empirischen Ergebnis der Varianz und Variabilität der Begründungsmuster für die Verknüpfungen von Entwicklung und Sicherheit ist es nunmehr möglich, Schlussfolgerungen im Hinblick auf die Forschungsfrage zu ziehen: Ist deutsche Entwicklungspolitik im Lichte der Verknüpfung von Entwicklung und Sicherheit zunehmend eigennutz- und interessenorientiert?
In den Anfangsjahren von Wieczorek-Zeul spielen normative Aspekte wie Gerechtigkeit und Frieden im Zusammenhang mit der Genese des Themenfelds Frieden und Sicherheit eine wichtige Rolle. Prägend für die Politikformulierung sind dabei vor allem die Herausforderungen im Zusammenhang mit der Globalisierung, die den Ausgangspunkt für die Formulierung der von Wieczorek-Zeul geprägten Globalen Strukturpolitik bilden. Eine Eigennutzorientierung im realistischen Sinne scheint nur dann präsent, wenn es um unser Interesse der Wohlstandssicherung geht. Entwicklungspolitische Friedenförderung und Krisenpräventionen dienen dazu, die ökonomischen Kosten von Kriegen zu verringern und leisten einen Beitrag zur Vermeidung von wohlstandsgefährdender Migration. Es wird auf einen Sicherheitsbegriff rekurriert, der die Menschliche Sicherheit der Bevölkerung in den Entwicklungs- und Transformationsländern in den Vordergrund stellt. Nach 9/11 verschieben sich die sprachlichen Konstruktionen weg von unserem Wohlstand und dem Frieden weltweit in Richtung unsere Sicherheit. Artikulierte Eigennutzorientierung mit Bezug auf Sicherheit gewinnt an Dominanz gegenüber moralischen Begründungszusammenhängen. Diese Entwicklung lässt sich vor allem im Rahmen der ressortübergreifenden Interpretationen des Zusammenhangs von Entwicklung und Sicherheit nachzeichnen. Auch bei dieser ressortübergreifenden Verschiebung lässt sich die Verknüpfung von Entwicklung und Sicherheit auf der Ebene des für die deutsche Entwicklungspolitik federführenden Bundesministeriums für wirtschaftliche Zusammenarbeit und Entwicklung (BMZ) hingegen weiterhin als vorwiegend verpflichtungsorientiert deuten. Erst mit der Großen Koalition ab 2005 kann von umfassenderer Neu-Interpretation der Verknüpfung von Entwicklung und Sicherheit ausgegangen werden: Wohlstand und Sicherheit in der Welt werden nunmehr gleichermaßen als in unserem Interesse artikuliert, die neben der internationalen Verpflichtung zur Friedenssicherung als gleichwertig eingeschätzt werden können
Zusammenfassend bringen diese empirischen Ergebnisse im Lichte der theoretischen Deutung ein nuancierter es Bild hervor als in der bisherigen Forschung mit ihrem meist einseitigen Fokus auf einer zunehmenden Interessenorientierung angenommen wurde. Die ideellen Bezüge waren immer präsent als prägender Faktor für die deutsche Entwicklungspolitik, sie haben sich allerdings im Zeitverlauf verändert. Der theoretische Ertrag der Studie und die Policy-Relevanz liegen auf mehreren Ebenen. Erstens wird mit der differenzierten Untersuchung und Deutung deutscher Entwicklungspolitik im Lichte der Verknüpfungen von Entwicklung und Sicherheit die Forschung zum Thema Versicherheitlichung von Entwicklungspolitik angereichert und deren theoretische Prämissen weiterentwickelt. Zweitens leistet die Arbeit einen Beitrag zur Forschung zur deutschen Entwicklungspolitik. Mit der vorliegenden Studie wird diese oft an der Umsetzung und Praxis interessierte Forschung durch die theoretische Beschäftigung mit der Deutung deutscher Entwicklungspolitik angereichert. Dieser Beitrag ergibt sich konkret aus der Anwendung theoretischer Überlegungen der Sicherheitsstudien, aus dem konstruktivistischen Strang der Theorien der Internationalen Beziehungen (IB) sowie konzeptionellen Überlegungen aus der Policy-Forschung, die miteinander verknüpft werden.
Ivo Lormes zeigt, dass der Kommunalisierungstrend in der
Energieversorgung als Indikator eines zukunftsgerichteten Zeitalterskommunal(-energie-)wirtschaftlicher Betätigung gedeutet werden kann.
Die sich dabei manifestierende neue Qualität institutioneller Arrangements interpretiert er als Indiz für eine ‚Gewährleistungskommune 2.0‘. Neben einer Analyse der seit 2005 in Deutschland erfolgten Stadtwerke-Gründungen werden in seinem Buch erstmals die im Rahmen dieser Kommunalisierungen ablaufenden politischen Prozesse fallstudienvergleichend untersucht. Dadurch wird eine systematische Ermittlung der Einflussfaktoren zu der Frage ermöglicht, warum manche Kommunen ihre Energieversorgung kommunalisieren und andere nicht.
Nathalie Hirschmann geht der Frage nach, auf welche Weise sich die Sicherheitswirtschaft im System der Sicherheit zu etablieren sucht und wie erfolgreich ihr dies gelingt. Ihre Analyse verdeutlicht, wie Schmuddelimage und begrenzte Kompetenzzuschreibung der Branche einerseits erschweren, neben der Polizei als institutionelle Trägerin der öffentlichen Sicherheit zu bestehen, und andererseits, gegenüber dem Kunden bzw. Auftraggeber in ein professionelleres Gefüge zu treten. Einen inhaltsanalytisch theoriegeleiteten, soziologisch-konzeptionellen Blick einnehmend wird deutlich, welche Ausbaubestrebungen kognitiver und sozialer Art die Sicherheitswirtschaft vorgenommen hat und wo diese an ihre Grenzen stoßen.
Christoph Sebastian Widdau leistet mit seinem Buch einen innovativen Beitrag zur Cassirer-Forschung, zu den Leibniz-Studien und zur Begründung der Menschenrechte. Er wirft ein ideengeschichtlich und philosophisch neues Licht auf die 'Natur' im Naturrecht, die kulturelle Bedeutung des Individuums und den Pluralismus politischer Ordnungen. Mit 'Cassirers Leibniz' zeigt Widdau auf, dass Menschenrechte kein beliebiger Zusatz zur Kultur, sondern vielmehr kulturkonstitutiv sind.