Thinking and Working Politically: Learning from practice. Overview to Special Issue

Over the last 15 years, a set of ideas now referred to as “thinking and working politically” (TWP) has coalesced into a “second orthodoxy” about how to take context into account when implementing development interventions. This approach stresses the importance of obtaining a better understanding of the local context (“thinking politically”) in order to support local actors to bring about sustainable developmental change (“working politically”). However, the evidence base to justify this new approach remains thin, despite a growing number of programmes which purport to be implementing it. Officials in development agencies struggle with putting it into practice and it is unclear how TWP differs—or not—from similar approaches, such as Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA) and Doing Development Differently (DDD). This Special Issue sheds light on what TWP means in practice by examining a set of initiatives undertaken by both development partners and government departments in Nigeria, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, China and India. This overview article outlines, in brief, each of the Special Issue's four papers and then draws out five lessons—for funders and for practitioners—from across all the papers. Our five lessons are: (1) the fundamental importance of undertaking political economy analysis (PEA) to adapt programmes to their contexts; (2) the importance of having a realistic level of ambition for interventions; (3) the need to support local ownership—not just “agreement ownership” (between a donor agency and government) or local “management ownership” of the programme, but critically “driver ownership” by generating trust with the key local actors driving change; (4) the need for a more effective set of tools for measuring results in complex programmes that attempt to achieve improvements in long‐run governance; and, (5) that although the political economy of donors is often seen as a barrier to applying TWP, the articles show how much can be done with a TWP approach if the analysis takes into account the political economy of donors as well as that of the local context. We conclude with a set of operational recommendations for donors and implementors, as well as suggestions of avenues for further research.     

The Tragedy of the Atmospheric Commons: Discounting Future Costs and Risks in Pursuit of Immediate Fossil‐Fuel Benefits

One of the most significant positive approaches to the politics of climate change on the scale required by the problem is that of Giddens. This paper uncovers weaknesses in his argument and reveals motivational divergence for mitigation and energy security in both Canada and New Zealand, which is opposite to what occurred in Northern Europe that provided the basis for his analysis. This suggests that the response to climate change varies according to deeper cultural and geophysical structures. The paper also examines cost(risk)‐benefit analysis versus the precautionary principle, the directionality of political‐economic convergence with mitigation, and political partisanship concerning climate change. It documents the complexity of making near‐term economic opportunities converge with mitigation of distant harm.     

Promoting behavioral change towards lower energy consumption in the building sector

Climate change and environmental issues have been increasingly in the forefront of the media and government agendas. However, despite much discussion and fanfare, little has been done in the way of serious commitment and clear course of actions since the adoption of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 to bring carbon emissions to sustainable levels. To tackle the immensity of the climate change challenge, a paradigm shift in understanding is necessary to balance the course of global human development with energy demand and consumption patterns. Accounting for over 40% of global energy demand and more than 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, the building sector offers the greatest mitigation potential for reducing carbon emissions in both the short and long term, with positive implications for a range of associated sectors and industries. Promoting behavioral change among end-users for reduced energy consumption as well as encouraging the building industry to embrace sustainable design, low-carbon construction practices and materials, and renewable technologies, is fundamental to mitigating the impact of the built environment on planetary biospheres and preserving quality of life for generations to come. This paper starts by drawing attention to the building sector and related EU policy, outlining the challenges and opportunities for reducing energy consumption and carbon emission levels. Such policy provides the essential framework to engage stakeholders and allow supporting factors to foster progress in the sector. The paper contends that information on climate change has not led to significant improvements in meeting global targets and that what is needed is behavioral change among individuals and society as a whole. On the basis of research project experiences and literature review, it puts forth and explores five key elements contributing to behavioral change for reduced energy consumption and lower carbon emissions in the building sector, focused on: information and education; financial incentives and energy services; modern technologies and sustainable design; social and community norms; and biophilia (contact with the natural environment). The paper suggests opportunities for further research and concludes with recommendations for policy-makers and related stakeholders.     

NeoLiberalism and the Challenges of Managing Labour Migration in Urban Malaysia

Labour migration into Malaysia has increased rapidly in recent decades and this has affected Malaysia's government policy in managing migrants’ movement. Interestingly, Malaysia has attracted a high degree of unskilled labour, accompanied by unabated rise of undocumented migrant workers. Mitigating undocumented migration is the main aim of Malaysia's labour migration policy and therefore the focus of Malaysian government. This has impacted on how enforcement agencies work out strategies. These agencies are the forefront of Malaysia's labour migration policy but they faced a number of challenges, such as documentation, finance and manpower capability, and political intervention, which impede their ability to optimize their capabilities in enforcing the Malaysian government labour migration policy. Resolving these challenges and moving towards a long‐term labour migration policy will benefit the Malaysian state, its citizens and the labour migrants.     

Climate Change,the Quadrilemma of Globalization,and Other Politically Incorrect Reactions

Abstract

Current global climate change negotiations face some contradictions that are not always addressed as they are considered politically incorrect. These include, first, the decoupling of commitments for planetary environmental policies with the actual national strategies. A relevant example is the Bolivian administration, which presents a strong rhetoric for biospheric Mother Earth Rights, but its national development strategies generate more environmental impacts and weaken enforcement at the local level. Second, the core ideas and beliefs that explain development varieties that generate climate change are deeply rooted, so changes in political ideologies, either from traditional ‘left’ or ‘right’, do not determine policies to effectively overcome climate change. Third, accumulation of scientific information is not enough to promote the necessary changes, because these deep roots conditioned perceived and acceptable alternatives. Fourth, this lead to tensions among the pursuit of economic financial globalization, the sovereignty of the nations-states, democracy, and the basement of global environmental conservation. This is a quadrilemma, because if one or two of these objectives are pursued, at least one other is violated. Nevertheless, international negotiations rest on wishful thinking that this is possible. Uncovering these contradictions is politically incorrect for many realms.     

Social Sector Priorities: An Analysis of Budgets and Expenditures in India in the 1990s

Many policies in India, including economic reform policies, are officially intended to alleviate poverty. But how committed is the Indian government? And to what? This article addresses India's social spending priorities over the past decade. Looking at the rhetoric in budget speeches, actual expenditure patterns and the process by which budgets are formulated, it finds a widened concept of poverty and a shift away from income and employment programmes to human development. The budget‐making process is not very participatory, and the role of the Finance Ministry has increased. Although the widening of the concept of poverty has positive aspects, within the overall context of structural adjustment it has facilitated the politically convenient neglect of other dimensions (income and employment).     

向低碳能源转型以缓解气候变化——以中国、印度为例

中国和印度都相当依赖高碳含量化石燃料。本文阐述两国向低碳能源转型的意义,它不仅能减轻对气候变化的负面影响’,还能令经济增长。文中涉及3个案例——中国的电力部门、北京的经济部门以及印度农村还没通电的家庭——它们都减少了排放温室气体和使用能源,但却增加了成本。可见要为气候友好型低碳经济作出贡献,是需要资金支持和技术转移的。     

Strategies and tactics in NGO–government relations

Relationships between nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and government agencies have been variously described in the nonprofit literature as cooperative, complementary, adversarial, confrontational, or even co‐optive. But how do NGO–government relationships emerge in practice, and is it possible for NGOs to manage multiple strategies of interaction at once? This article examines the experience of three leading NGOs in Mumbai, India, involved in slum and squatter housing. We investigate how they began relating with government agencies during their formative years and the factors that shaped their interactions. We find that NGOs with similar goals end up using very different strategies and tactics to advance their housing agendas. More significant, we observe that NGOs are likely to employ multiple strategies and tactics in their interactions with government. Finally, we find that an analysis of strategies and tactics can be a helpful vehicle for clarifying an organization's theory of change.     

Why Don't They Just Change? Contract Farming,Informational Influence,and Barriers to Agricultural Climate Change Mitigation

Using a mixed‐methods study of contract seed‐corn farmers in southwest Michigan, we examine the effect of interlocking macro and micro social forces on climate change behavior and apply the theoretical frames of treadmills of production and informational influence. We find that competitive agricultural contracts in the seed‐corn industry impose significant structural barriers to adopting climate change mitigation behaviors. Seed‐corn contracts constrain adoption of those behaviors through competitive rankings based solely on net commodity production and by limiting farmers’ access to information to make judicious management decisions. At the micro level, our findings suggest that informational influence—that is, where farmers turn for trusted information—also affects climate change mitigation behaviors, and that these informational networks are embedded within structural constraints. Our findings suggest that agricultural contracts serve as a significant structural constraint on the adoption of mitigation practices and that climate scholarship and policy must address both macro and micro dimensions simultaneously to encourage adoption of climate change mitigation.     

Climate‐Change Adaptation and Mitigation: Implications for Land Acquisition and Population Relocation

In response to the challenge of climate change developing‐country governments are evolving adaptation and mitigation programmes for which they are seeking international financing. This article presents the findings of a review of national action programmes and other interventions to assess their likely societal impacts with an emphasis on land‐use change, future land acquisitions, population displacement and resettlement. It considers the policy and development challenges involuntary resettlement in particular will pose, and assesses the robustness of current governance arrangements to manage them and cautions that at present the financing arrangements do not prioritise the legal protection of affected populations.     

Re-assembling climate change policy: Materialism,posthumanism, and the policy assemblage

National and international policy-makers have addressed threats to environmental sustainability from climate change and other environmental degradation for over 30 years. However, it is questionable whether current policies are socially, politically, economically, and scientifically capable of adequately resolving these threats to the planet and living organisms. In this paper we theorize and develop the concept of a “policy assemblage” from within a new materialist ontology, to interrogate critically four policy perspectives on climate change: “liberal environmentalism”; the United Nations policy statements on sustainable development; “green capitalism” (also known as “climate capitalism”) and finally “no-growth economics.” A materialist analysis of interactions between climate change and policies enables us to establish what each policy can do, what it ignores or omits, and consequently its adequacy to address environmental sustainability in the face of climate change. None, we conclude, is adequate or appropriate to address climate change successfully. We then use this conceptual tool to establish a “posthuman” policy on climate change. Humans, from this perspective, are part of the environment, not separate from or in opposition to it, but possess unique capacities that we suggest are now necessary to address climate change. This ontology supplies the starting point from which to establish sociologically a scientifically, socially, and politically adequate posthuman climate change policy. We offer suggestions for the constituent elements of such a policy.     

Support for Climate Change Policy: Social Psychological and Social Structural Influences*

Abstract We investigated preferences for climate change mitigation policies and factors contributing to higher levels of policy support. The sample was comprised of 316 Michigan and Virginia residents, all of whom completed mail surveys. Of the eight policies proposed to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, respondents overwhelmingly indicated they would not support a gas tax, while support was highest for shifting subsidies away from fossil fuels and towards sustainable energy strategies. With the exception of taxes on gasoline and “gas guzzlers,” a majority of respondents supported all other mitigation policies. Multivariate analyses revealed that greater trust in environmentalists and less trust in industry, greater recognition of the consequences of climate change, higher income, being black, and older age were predictive of greater policy support. Personal values (e.g., altruism), future orientation, and political affiliation were strong predictors of policy support but only indirectly via worldviews and environmental beliefs.     

Involving constituents in agency priority setting: a case study

Many government agencies have "constituents" who believe the agencies should hear and consider their needs and desires in establishing program priorities. This article describes how one involves interested constituents (consumers, industry, medical professionals, and state organizations) in the agency's annual priority-setting process. This participation has produced a number of beneficial results-some expected and some unexpected.     

Sustainable lifestyles for all? Disability equality,sustainability and the limitations of current UK policy

In recent years, various environmental threats have been highlighted in relation to disability. Growing knowledge of the effects of climate change and particular impacts on disabled people have been highlighted by a number of authors, including a recent critique of disabled people’s ‘vulnerability’ with respect to environmental hazard. This article focuses on the issue of citizen involvement with climate change mitigation – and more broadly individual and household-level efforts to reduce our impact on the environment. These more mundane aspects of climate change mitigation, for example through transitions to more sustainable lifestyles, also have significant implications for disabled people. The article argues that disability equality is a key component of sustainability. Limitations are demonstrated in policy designed to address these issues using the example of current UK policy, and it is suggested that policy approaches to sustainability should also be a concern of disability studies.     

Forced Migration,Climate Change,Mitigation and Adaptive Policies in Mexico: Some Functional Relationships

Natural disasters related to hydro-meteorological events have increased during the last few decades, both in frequency and severity. Mexico is heavily exposed to climate change, but has also suffered in the past from climate variability ( Blümel, 2009 ). The new risks oblige the government to develop mitigation processes, while the affected people are implementing strategies of adaptation and resilience-building, mostly at the family and community level. This includes forced migration due to climate change into the slums of megacities or illegal immigration to the United States. The arid, semi-arid and subhumid condition of 49.2 per cent of the territory of Mexico is seriously affected by climate change. In addition, poverty and the lack of jobs have created complex livelihood situations, in which young people leave rural areas, partly due to socio-economic pull factors. In this paper, we address the functional relationships between climate patterns and migration processes in Mexico, highlighting the linkages between the origin of migrants, their economic activity and their vulnerability to extreme events and we discuss long-term climate patterns. Agriculture still uses 78 per cent of the available water in Mexico. In the drylands the competition for water use requires an integrated policy to deal with the new threats from climate change, including mitigation from the top down and adaptation processes from the bottom up to reduce the social vulnerability of the rural population in the highly affected drylands of the central and northern parts of Mexico. The new policy for administering water resources, which promotes the efficient use of an increasingly scarce and polluted resource, still suffers from a lack of participation by the affected rural population. In this paper, we propose an integrated management system from the watershed onwards, involving socio-economic, political, cultural and hydrological variables, to deal with the rising scarcity of water, and the uncertainty and complexity of climate change.     

A shift in Western development agency thinking? The case for second best

This review essay illustrates a turn in Western development agency thinking in two recent publications intended for development agencies and African “reformers,” by authors with long careers in Western development institutions. Both publications explicitly reject – at least for the short to medium term – a comprehensive “good governance” approach to development. Subsequently, a publication entitled Violence and Social Orders, authored by three American scholars with an interest in the role of institutions in historical change, is reviewed since it is a crucial influence in the consolidation of this turn in thinking. This new Western approach is more restrained in its ambition to introduce new governance institutions in the developing world. This implies that it is prepared to tolerate what it considers to be imperfections in both the state and the market, viewing these as a second best result (in the short to medium term) in exchange for greater chances of realising positive development outcomes over the long term.     

气候变化政治对海湾国家的影响

海湾地区气候炎热,淡水资源缺乏。长期以来,海湾国家主要依靠能源出口获取大量资金,借此修建海水淡化工厂等各种设施以适应和改善气候环境的影响。近年来,国际社会在应对全球变暖问题的协调合作中,已形成一种处理全球气候变化的政治。气候变化政治要求各国减少能源消耗和降低二氧化碳排放量以缓解全球变暖趋势,从而对海湾国家以能源出口收益来维护生存环境和社会稳定的基本经济模式构成冲击。面对气候变化政治带来的冲击,海湾国家目前的权宜选择只能是继续扩大能源出口,并尽量拖延实施气候变化协议来进行应对。然而,这种做法虽可以暂时保持海湾国家改善环境的努力和维护其经济政治结构稳定,但却难以消除全球气候变化政治今后长期推动能源结构调整和节能减排所带来的压力。     

Funder‐initiated integration

The active role of funders in organizational restructuring and consolidation is becoming a more common area of study, because more funders—private and government funders alike—are moving in the direction of encouraging funded agencies to explore new strategies such as mergers and integrations. This research focuses on funder‐initiated nonprofit integration and explores the challenges and strategies demonstrated by a government grantor and nine funded agencies as they planned and developed a management service organization. This was an action research study, whereby all parties participated as co‐researchers to examine the integration challenges and the partnership strategies used to move the integration process forward.     

The agricultural ethics of biofuels: climate ethics and mitigation arguments

An environmental, climate mitigation rationale for research and development (R&D) on liquid transportation fuels derived from plants emerged among many scientists and engineers during the last decade. However, between 2006 and 2010, this climate ethic for pursuing biofuel became politically entangled and conceptually confused with rationales for encouraging greater use of plant-based ethanol that were both unconnected to climate ethics and potentially in conflict with the value-commitments providing a mitigation-oriented reason to promote and develop new and expanded sources of biofuel. I argue that the conceptual construct of technological trajectories provides a fecund approach to the ethical evaluation of R&D strategies in the case of plant-based liquid transportation fuels. The idea of a trajectory has a current use in the literature of science studies and aptly summarizes a number of themes that are critical to the evaluation of tools and techniques whose future shape, design, applications and potential consequences are necessarily somewhat speculative. In the case of biofuels, it is the imagined future trajectory that provides the basis for resistance to an emerging technology, rather than the present-day technical capabilities and the unexpected consequences of biofuel development.     

埃及过渡政府的外交政策之调整

埃及过渡政府成立以来,已在外交政策方面做出多方面调整:对中东和周边的以色列、伊朗、尼罗河流域国家等,过渡政府的外交政策调整以转向和改变为主,且调整幅度较大;对以美国为首的欧美大国,采取了延续基础上的调整;对包括中国在内的传统友好国家,则继续维持与深化与这些国家的关系.过渡政府对外交政策作出调整的原因主要包括:国内群众的诉求、重塑阿拉伯世界的领导形象以及革命后埃及“本土化”意识的兴起.埃及在外交方面的调整涉及美国、伊朗、以色列、海湾国家、非洲各国等,无疑对地区安全与合作产生了重要影响.