Political Participation of Local Publics in the Unemployment Field: A Comparison of Lyon and Turin

This article focuses on political participation of local publics in the unemployment field, examining networks of collective actors in Lyon and Turin. Our main question is: Is the participation of local publics fostered under conditions of more developed governance that increases bottom-up access (formal or informal) to elites and institutions in the policy domain? Drawing upon the most recent developments in literatures on social movement theory, governance and network analysis, this article discusses the main variations in terms of political participation of local publics in Lyon and Turin. It then enquires into the main explanatory factors accounting for these variations, thus showing that the openness of governance does influence the level of political participation of local publics. The main argument is that in an open context participation is low, while in a closed (or underdeveloped) context local publics participate more, with differential access to decision-making according to their resources.     

Evaluating heterogeneous brokerage: New conceptual and methodological approaches and their application to multi-level environmental governance networks

We present two new approaches for assessing the relative contributions of different types of actors to heterogeneous brokerage in networks. These approaches distinguish between the tendency of certain types of actors to (1) mediate between dissimilar actors (heterogeneous brokerage “activity”), and (2) be the sole mediators between dissimilar actors (“exclusivity”). We present methods for implementing these approaches, using baseline models of tie formation and node removal, respectively. To illustrate the value of both approaches, independently and in combination, we apply them to evaluate horizontal and vertical heterogeneous brokerage in two environmental governance networks. Our analysis reveals certain types of actors with high heterogeneous brokerage activity but low exclusivity (and vice versa), which has important implications for governance processes and outcomes. Likewise, results show many similarities across the evaluated networks, but also some notable differences, suggesting that the incentives and constraints for heterogeneous brokerage vary not only by actor type, but also by network-level contextual differences.     

Local Solidarities: How the Arab Spring Protests Started

Coming as a surprise to most observers and following the self‐immolation of a street vendor in a remote town of central Tunisia, the Jasmine Revolution of 2010–2011, the first uprising of the Arab Spring, has often been seen as a success story for digital communication through widespread use of social media. We suggest that this applied to the later phase of the protests in Tunisia but not to the initial phase, which occurred in local areas in impoverished and marginalized regions with highly limited access to the Internet. The initial phase lasted a full 10 days before the protests reached major cities where social media operated. Building on Tilly's concept of trust network, we offer the concept of local solidarities as key to the beginning of the Arab Spring uprisings and as encompassing spatial proximity, shared marginalized status, and kinship, all of which combined to serve as a basis for trust and collective action.     

Legitimating impotence: Pyrrhic victories of the modern environmental movement

The strengths and limitations of the modern environmental movement are assessed, using a contextual analysis, with a framework drawn from pragmatic analysis. Empirical summaries from recent policy-making supported by the movement: in community-based recycling, local toxic waste movements, and water pollution control document the fact that the movement has indeed developed some sustainable resistance in policy-making in the U.S. and at the Rio Conference. But it has also ignored those consequences of environmental protection which degrade the living conditions for many people of color and other low-income groups. The movement's failure to form enduring coalitions for linking environmental protection to social justice limits the movement's power, by permitting disempowered groups to be mobilized in opposition to environmental protection. We outline an alternative strategy, built around sustainable legitimacy, which will require changes in the composition and program of environmental movement organizations.     

Channeling advocacy? Assessing how funding source shapes the strategies of environmental organizations

ABSTRACT

All non–governmental organizations (NGOs) rely on funding to support their work. But how does the source of funding shape the types of advocacy groups engage in? Using novel panel data collected by the Environmental Funders Network, this research examines how funding from government, foundations, business, and members shape the advocacy work of environmental NGOs (ENGOs) in the UK. Past research suggests that elite funding sources channel groups into institutional advocacy, such as lobbying or litigation, and away from public advocacy, such as protesting. This paper confirms previous research while also showing that all types of funding channel group actions. Foundation and business funding is associated with more institutional advocacy, government funding is associated with non–political advocacy such as species conservation, and member funding is associated with public advocacy. By comparing across funding types, this study demonstrates the ways in which groups are both helped and hindered by funding from different sources.     

Making democracy matter: Responsibility and effective environmental governance in regional Australia

This paper will critically examine the changing social relations of responsibility associated with Australia's current regional ‘experiment’ in environmental governance. This experiment centrally involves the transfer of responsibility for natural resource management (NRM) from Federal and State governments to community-based regional bodies. Although governments are promoting democratic NRM planning at the regional level as a more effective means of addressing Australia's environmental problems, we argue that a tension is emerging in association with the simultaneous pursuit of these goals: ‘effectiveness’ has been defined in terms of the accountability of regional communities to central governments for the achievement of short-term results, an approach which is undermining the democratic promise that regional bodies would be responsive to wider community concerns. The notion of ‘responsibility’ provides a means of investigating this tension, as accountability and responsiveness are both elements of the overarching concept of responsibility. The examination of NRM institutions through this theoretical lens indicates that the shared substantive interests required to motivate a sense of shared responsibility amongst regional actors have been sidelined by the procedural demands of accountability. We argue that, if NRM planning is to be genuinely accountable and responsive to substantive public ends, the properly social and dialogical nature of responsibility relationships must be recovered. The paper concludes with a discussion of the social and political relations of responsibility that appear to provide the best opportunities for effective environmental governance, and thus for the achievement of more sustainable NRM outcomes, at the regional level.     

Between the Global Environmental Regime and Local Sustainability: A Local Review on the Inclusion, Failure and Reinventing Process of the Environmental Governance

Abstract: Japan has undergone drastic changes in ecological policy and practice over the past 40 years. Although this short history began with significant levels of pollution, notoriously termed “kogai”, the country seems to have achieved great ecological improvements, both technologically and institutionally, and now is one of the most highly ecologically modernized countries. But can this process really be posited as a simple, linear one of ecological modernization, a sort of natural, historical progress toward ideal environmental governance? This paper proposes some questions that cast doubt over this view. It focuses on local struggles for environmental governance, particularly in the city of Kamakura, which proclaimed itself an “environmental municipality” in 1993, a designation that seemingly fell by the wayside in 2001. Investigating this 8‐year case we can extract some lessons concerning the contradictions between global and local, and consequently about the inherent difficulties of top‐down environmental ordinances and insufficiently decentralized environmental governance. At the same time, through this case readers may also discover a new type of civic activity: cities with agriculture. After a short sketch of agri‐environmental movements, I will suggest that such movements are converging with more conventional ones and prevailing throughout the country. Therefore, the ecological modernization process can be seen to include a sort of restoration process: an updated return to perma‐cultural sustainability. Consequently, this essay contributes to international environmental discussion, not only by uncovering the cleavages between global and local, but also by suggesting the possibility of environmental governance alternative to technologically and institutionally driven ones.     

Linking Local Government Discretion and Accountability in Decentralisation

Decentralisation offers significant opportunities to improve government accountability by exerting stronger pressures both from below (demand) and above (supply). The literature contains many examples, however, where the potential has not been realised, partly because decentralisation reforms have often been introduced without thinking through their accountability implications. Even when accountability is taken into account, the efforts tend to emphasise either the supply or the demand side of the equation, but not both. Drawing on the sets of literature on fiscal, administrative and political decentralisation, this article presents a methodology for studying this.     

Participatory spaces and the Alexandra Vukuzenzele Crisis Committee (AVCC): reshaping government plans

This article challenges the prevailing orthodoxy in the South African literature on participation in development, which suggests that it is government structures alone that determine citizen participation in development. It focuses on the empirical example of the Alexandra Vukuzenzele Crisis Committee (AVCC), an affiliate of the Anti‐Privatisation Forum (APF), to show the ways in which agents shape and recreate development practices on the Alexandra Renewal Project (ARP), an African National Congress flagship programme. To do this, the article draws from interviews with stakeholders involved in the ARP as well as the AVCC who seek to contest the allocation of houses in the ARP. Following Cornwall (2004 Cornwall, A. 2004. “Spaces for transformation? Reflections on issues of power and difference in participation in development”. In Participation from tyranny to transformation: exploring new approaches to participation in development, Edited by: Hickey, S. and Mohan, G. 75–91. London: Zed Books.  [Google Scholar]), this article argues that agents can force the government to concede to their demands despite the government's structures which initially appeared to exclude them.     

The role of emotions during the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in light of repertoires

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role of emotions during the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in the context of collective level emotions in mobilizations. Emotions are understood as a catalyst whose mechanism of action is performed through repertories. This article seeks to answer how emotions, having a triggering role, are performed through repertoires while accelerating mobilization against authoritarian orders, creating the intersection of individual and collective level emotions in public spheres of Tunisia and Egypt, and thus affecting the transnational diffusion of emotions. The significant reason to address emotions is to explain what stimulated the Arab Spring and how it spread over the region starting from Tunisia and Egypt. This article synthesizes two literatures: International Relations (IR) and social movements studies in light of emotions and components of repertoires which are as follows: collective action, collective identity, symbolic politics, network society and information politics.     

Social Networks and Individual Perceptions: Explaining Differential Participation in Social Movements

This paper seeks to explain differential participation in social movements. It does so by attempting to bridge structural-level and individual-level explanations. We test a number of hypotheses drawn from the social networks and the rationalist perspectives on individual engagement by means of survey data on members of a major organization of the Swiss solidarity movement. Both perspectives find empirical support: the intensity of participation depends both on the embeddedness in social networks and on the individual perceptions of participation, that is, the evaluation of a number of cognitive parameters related to engagement. In particular, to be recruited by an activist and the perceived effectiveness of one's own potential contribution are the best predictors of differential participation. We specify the role of networks for social movements by looking at the nature and content of networks and by distinguishing between three basic functions of networks: structurally connecting prospective participants to an opportunity to participate, socializing them to a protest issue, and shaping their decision to become involved. The latter function implies that the embeddedness in social networks significantly affects the individual perceptions of participation.     

Gender and Networks in a Local Voluntary-Sector Elite

Focusing on gender inequality in a local community elite, we investigate the role of gender in access to and participation in networks of nonprofit trustees in Louisville, Kentucky. We examine two types of network relations: participation in the network of overlapping board memberships (the structural network) and interpersonal ties of collegiality and friendship (the social network). Asking whether the gender hierarchy found in most private and public sector organizations is mirrored in this inner circle of trustees, with men occupying the most influential positions in the structural and social networks, we find some male advantage in the structural network. Men predominate in holding most board seats, occupying multiple board seats, and in having slightly greater network centrality. By contrast, women hold the edge in the social network, with slightly greater centrality and higher levels of social integration. Women's disadvantage in the structural network is at least partly counterbalanced by their prominence in the social network of trustees in Louisville. Results indicate that the local nonprofit sector includes a small number of women (but no people of color) in leadership roles.     

Social Networks and Sustained Activism in Local NIMBY Campaigns

This paper compares six NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) movement organizations to explain why some of these social movement organizations expanded their goals while others did not. Analysis of interview and survey (N = 113) data reveals that friendship networks within the movement foster goal expansion (in part because people want to preserve the context for these friendships). External local political networks promoting their own rhetorical and resource agendas will inhibit goal expansion if they establish trusted links to the NIMBY organizations.     

Globalization and Evolving Local Governance in Norway

Has local governance in Norway escaped the forces of globalization? In grappling with this question, and using the case of Trondheim Municipality, I argue that local government reform in Norway is predicated on the dominant paradigm of public sector reform in the age of globalization, namely, new public management (NPM). This has had corrosive effects on the capacity of the local states in Norway to provide basic services to their citizens. Consequently, the Norwegian welfare regime is being undermined by the new reform agenda. However, while local governance in Norway is predicated within the dominant global paradigm, it deviates from the global trend as there is increasing centralization as opposed to decentralization as the national government uses various mechanisms to regulate and control municipalities.

¿Ha podido el gobierno local en Noruega escaparse de las fuerzas de la globalización? Lidiando con esta pregunta y tomando el caso de la municipalidad de Trondheim, yo sostengo que la reforma del gobierno local en Noruega se basa en el paradigma dominante de la reforma del sector público en la era de la globalización, es decir la Nueva Administración Pública (NPM, por sus siglas en inglés). Esto ha tenido efectos corrosivos en la capacidad de los estados en Noruega, de proveer servicios básicos a sus ciudadanos. Consecuentemente, la asistencia pública del régimen noruego se ha minado gracias al nuevo plan de reforma. Sin embargo, mientras que el gobierno local se establece dentro del paradigma global dominante, éste se desvía de la tendencia global ya que existe un aumento en la centralización, al contrario de la descentralización, dado que el gobierno nacional usa varios mecanismos para regular y controlar las municipalidades.

     

Taiwan's identity in formation: in reaction to a democratizing Taiwan and a rising China

The formation of Taiwanese identity is a good example to make sense of the theoretical debate between primordialism and constructivism. Based on the two-level multinomial logit results, this paper proves that primordial ethnicity in Taiwan becomes less salient; rather, changing sociopolitical contexts turn out to be the dominant factor in shaping ethnic identity. Specifically, it indicates how the democratic transition has brought about various types of mechanisms, which smoothly disenchant the dominant Chinese identity. As the Taiwanese renaissance emerges to take a leading role in Taiwan's political platform, ethnic identity might be reshaped in accordance with this mainstream Taiwanese ideology. This study also shows that reformation of ethnic identity in Taiwan relies as much on cognition of state boundaries as on the evaluation of political-economic conditions on both sides of the Taiwan straits.     

Social Movement,Action and Change: The Influence of Women's Movements on City Government in Mumbai and London

This article reports on a research investigation into gender and local government in Mumbai in India and London in England. In both these cities female representation at the political level stands at around one third, achieved in London slowly in recent years and in Mumbai more rapidly through the adoption of a quota, or seat reservation system, implemented in 1992. In considering the experience of the women concerned it is argued that their presence and aspirations have been influenced through the networks of their respective women's movements, operating through civil society and the local state. In considering the ways in which they organize and manage the duties of office and their gendered identities, as well as in their focus on the most disadvantaged in their communities and in their dealings with others, the part played by social movements in influencing change is examined.     

The role of the partner in social support networks in Spain

Social support influences the subject’s well-being through various mechanisms. Literature shows that the partner is one of the main sources of social support. Nevertheless, sometimes people do not ask their partners first for help. Our aim is to determine what factors (values related to the family, personal characteristics and availability of resources) influence this decision. We use Spanish representative samples from International Social Survey Programme (2001) and Spain’s Center for Sociological Research (2010). Data show that family solidarity is widespread in Spanish society. The determinants for not turning first to the partner are the availability and frequent contact with immediate kin, whereas family values and personal characteristics are less relevant.     

Caught in a Winding,Snarling Vine: The Structural Bias of Political Process Theory

The study of social movements has recently been energized by an explosion of work that emphasizes political opportunities—a concept meant to come to grips with the complex environments that movements face. In the excitement over this new metaphor, there has been a tendency to stretch it to cover a wide variety of empirical phenomena and causal mechanisms. A strong structural bias is also apparent in the way that political opportunities are understood and in the selection of cases for study. Even those factors adduced to correct some of the problems of the political opportunity approach—such as mobilizing structures and cultural framing—are subject to the same structural distortions. We recommend social movement analysis that rejects invariant modeling, is wary of conceptual stretching, and recognizes the diverse ways that culture and agency, including emotions and strategizing, shape collective action.     

Imagining new feminist futures: How feminist social movements contest the neoliberalization of feminism in an increasingly corporate‐dominated world

Increasingly it is argued that feminism has been co‐opted by neoliberal agendas: becoming more individualistic and losing touch with its wider social change objectives. The neoliberalization of feminism is driven in part by increased corporate power, including the growing role of corporations in governance arenas, and corporate social responsibility agendas. However, we turn to social movement theory to elucidate strategies that social movements, including feminist social movements, are adopting in such spaces. In so doing, we find that feminist activists are engaging with new political opportunities, mobilizing structures and strategic framing processes that emerge in the context of increasingly neoliberal and privatized governance systems. We suggest that despite the significant challenges to their agendas, far from being co‐opted by neoliberalism, feminist social movements remain robust, existing alongside and developing new strategies to contest the neoliberalization of feminism in a variety of innovative ways.