Celebrating Economies of Change: Brave Visions for Inclusive Futures

This issue has been inspired by a path-breaking conference held by the Canadian Society for Ecologi-cal Economics (CANSEE), which took place this past May 2019 in Waterloo, Ontario. Entitled Engaging Economies of Change, the conference aimed to ex-pand existing research networks in the economy-environment nexus by building connections beyond the academy in order to meaningfully engage with the practicalities of building and implementing change. This issue captures the rich content shared during the event, as well as descriptions of the pro-cesses and efforts made to create a welcoming and respectful space where academics and community activists could build alliances and discuss common challenges. The conference organizers – all graduate students and activists themselves -- called this ‘building a brave space’.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Data Epistemologies / Surveillance and Uncertainty

Data Epistemologies studies the changing ways in which ‘knowledge’ is defined, promised, problematised, legitimated vis-á-vis the advent of digital, ‘big’ data surveillance technologies in early twenty-first century America. As part of the period’s fascination with ‘new’ media and ‘big’ data, such technologies intersect ambitious claims to better knowledge with a problematisation of uncertainty. This entanglement, I argue, results in contextual reconfigurations of what ‘counts’ as knowledge and who (or what) is granted authority to produce it – whether it involves proving that indiscriminate domestic surveillance prevents terrorist attacks, to arguing that machinic sensors can know us better than we can ever know ourselves. The present work focuses on two empirical cases. The first is the ‘Snowden Affair’ (2013-Present): the public controversy unleashed through the leakage of vast quantities of secret material on the electronic surveillance practices of the U.S. government. The second is the ‘Quantified Self’ (2007-Present), a name which describes both an international community of experimenters and the wider industry built up around the use of data-driven surveillance technology for self-tracking every possible aspect of the individual ‘self’. By triangulating media coverage, connoisseur communities, advertising discourse and leaked material, I examine how surveillance technologies were presented for public debate and speculation. This dissertation is thus a critical diagnosis of the contemporary faith in ‘raw’ data, sensing machines and algorithmic decision-making, and of their public promotion as the next great leap towards objective knowledge. Surveillance is not only a means of totalitarian control or a technology for objective knowledge, but a collective fantasy that seeks to mobilise public support for new epistemic systems. Surveillance, as part of a broader enthusiasm for ‘data-driven’ societies, extends the old modern project whereby the human subject – its habits, its affects, its actions – become the ingredient, the raw material, the object, the target, for the production of truths and judgments about them by things other than themselves

Power Relationships in Information Systems Security Policy Formulation and Implementation

This thesis argues that organizational power impacts the development and implementation of Information Systems (IS) Security policy. The motivation for this research stems from the continuing concern of ineffective security in organizations, leading to significant monetary losses. IS researchers have contended that ineffective IS Security policy is a precursor to ineffective IS Security (Loch et al. 1992; Whitman et al. 2001; David 2002; Solms and Solms 2004). Beyond this pragmatic aspect, there is a gap in the literature concerning power relationships and IS Security policy. This research intends to bridge the gap. The dissertation is a two phased study whereby the first phase seeks to understand the intricacies of IS Security policy formulation and implementation. In the first phase, a conceptual framework utilizes Katz\u27s (1970) semantic theory. The conceptual framework provides the theoretical foundation for a case study that takes place at an educational institution\u27s Information Technology (IT) Department. In the results, it is confirmed that a disconnect exists between IS Security policy formulation and implementation. Furthermore, a significant emergent finding indicates that power relationships have a direct impact on this observed disconnect. The second phase takes place as an in depth case study at the IT department within a large financial organization. The theoretical foundation for the second phase is based was Clegg\u27s (2002) Circuits of Power. A conceptual framework for this phase utilizes this theory. This framework guides the study of power relationships and how they might affect the formulation and implementation of IS Security policy in this organization. The case study demonstrates that power relationships have a clear impact on the formulation and implementation of IS security policy. Though there is a strong security culture at the organization and a well defined set of processes, an improvement in the process and ensuing security culture is possible by accounting for the effect of power relationships

The Right to Quantitative Privacy

We are at the cusp of a historic shift in our conceptions of the Fourth Amendment driven by dramatic advances in surveillance technology. Governments and their private sector agents continue to invest billions of dollars in massive data-mining projects, advanced analytics, fusion centers, and aerial drones, all without serious consideration of the constitutional issues that these technologies raise. In United States v. Jones, the Supreme Court signaled an end to its silent acquiescence in this expanding surveillance state. In that case, five justices signed concurring opinions defending a revolutionary proposition: that citizens have Fourth Amendment interests in substantial quantities of information about their public or shared activities, even if they lack a reasonable expectation of privacy in the constitutive particulars. This quantitative approach to the Fourth Amendment has since been the subject of hot debate on and off the courts. Among the most compelling challenges are questions about quantitative privacy’s constitutional pedigree, how it can be implemented in practice, and its doctrinal consequences. This Article takes up these challenges. The conversation after Jones has been dominated by proposals that seek to assess and protect quantitative privacy by focusing on the informational “mosaics” assembled by law enforcement officers in the course of their investigations. We think that this case-by-case approach both misunderstands the Fourth Amendment issues at stake and begets serious practical challenges. Drawing on lessons from information privacy law, we propose as an alternative that legislatures and courts acting in the shadow of Jones focus on the technologies. Under this technology-centered approach, any technology that is capable of facilitating broad programs of continuous and indiscriminate surveillance would be subject to Fourth Amendment regulation. This does not mean that government would be barred from using these technologies. Rather, it would require that the terms of their deployment and use reflect a reasonable balance between privacy concerns and law enforcement’s interests in preventing, detecting, and prosecuting crime. This Article offers concrete proposals for how legislatures and courts might strike this balance while providing the clear guidance and predictability that critics of the mosaic theory rightly demand

South African Police reform in the 1990s : internal processes and external influences

Includes bibliographical references ( leaves 192-227).In the contemporary era policy-making is increasingly being shaped by non-domestic influences and actors. The mobility of policy ideas and mechanisms across time and space provides a challenge: How best to conceptualise the routes and modes of travelling whereby ideas and instruments are transported from one location to another? Conceptual tools originally designed in public policy circles - such as lesson-drawing, modelling, policy diffusion, policy transfer and convergence - have more recently been introduced into criminological enquiries regarding the convergence of criminal justice policies. This thesis applies the conceptual framework of policy transfer (referring to conscious efforts on the part of social agencies to export-import lessons from one locale to another) to the field of policing with a specific emphasis on South African police reform after 1990. The central focus of this enquiry is the interplay between novel, often externally derived , ideas and practices with a national police force at a time of immense political transition. Selective aspects of South African police reform are explored with specific emphasis on how, in what way, and to what extent, local reform efforts have been influenced by global notions and practices of good policing.Three institutional conduits for reformist policing ideas are considered. In the first instance, the contribution of policing scholars, a knowledge-based community of some importance, to debates on the pathways for police reform are discussed with an emphasis on the theoretical and normative assumptions that have guided their analyses of a policing ethos and system beyond Apartheid. Secondly, the role of an interim policy mechanism, the National Police Board (created in terms of a peace agreement signed in 1991) in setting an agenda for police reform is considered. Thirdly, the discussion profiles the international development community as a constituency of importance in recent police reform efforts. The latter exploration proceeds through a case study method. Three distinct examples of donor aid in support of institutional reform are described with particular reference to the paradigms invoked, the cultural entrepreneurs and policy networks involved, and the contextual factors that facilitated and/or constrained reformist efforts. A wide range of data collection methods were utilised during the course of the research. A literature review of contemporary debates on policy transfer, police and security sector reform in both mature and emerging democracies was undertaken. Furthermore, a wide range of primary documentary sources and various official policy documents were consulted. Face to face interviews with members of various policy constituencies also provided source material. Lastly, participant observation of policy structures and field notes compiled during evaluative research of a number of donor assisted projects provided contextual observations of importance to the analysis. This enquiry supports the conclusion that there is growing convergence in the language and practices associated with democratic police reform. Yet the dilemmas of policy transfer from North to South - particularly (although not exclusively) in the context of aid packages - are often underestimated. Local experiments suggest that whilst policy transfers can facilitate policy change, policies transferred all too easily become victims of domestic contingencies. Empirical enquiries into the context, processes and outcomes associated with reformist interventions are necessary to sharpen our understanding of how exactly policy travels and to what local effect. Recent reform activity aimed at the South African Police illustrates the extent to which policy communities situated at the local, national and transnational level do not exist in isolation but rather stand in a complex and interactive relationship to one another

The Governance of Climate Change Adaptation in Canada: Two Multilevel Case Studies

Anthropogenic climate change is affecting, and will continue to affect, communities across Canada. From increased average temperatures and alterations of seasonal precipitation patterns, to extreme rainfall and heat events, Canadians face a 21st century environment significantly different from that of the past. With risks to people and services identified via the global scientific and social science literature, the need to adapt to climate change is pressing. Climate change adaptation includes the identification of climate impacts in order to develop interventions into systems and services so to avoid negative effects and recognize opportunities. The emerging consensus is that climate change adaptation is challenged by the complexity of the cross-sector and cross-scale nature of climate impacts and the systems and services which are vulnerable to them. Due to jurisdictional divisions and public-private divides in many climate-impacted systems, adaptation scholarship has increasingly turned to the study of governance to conceptualize and overcome challenges. To contribute to this field, this study engages in an in-depth characterization of the current governance of climate change adaptation in Canada. Using an established theoretical framework of competing governance modes, the study characterizes adaptation governance in two Canadian sites as well as identifies the preferred visions of governing processes according to expert practitioners. Through analysis of key documents, eighty-one in-depth interviews, and two expert workshops, the thesis provides a number of novel insights for Canadian and international scholarship. In the thesis it is argued that the study of adaptation governance benefits from the application of a typology of competing governance modes. Further, the study identifies that current adaptation efforts in the Canadian sites are dominated by network processes and that the concept of network failure is consistent with the observed adaptation implementation deficit. Finally, it is revealed that practitioners at different scales of government in Canada’s federal structure idealize the governance of adaptation in drastically different ways, with local respondents providing critiques of network processes and increased interest in hierarchical governance. As climate impacts are projected to worsen in the coming decades, the findings of the study offer crucial insights for intervention into the governance of climate change adaptation

The role of collective bargaining in business sustainability and the future of work: a South African perspective

Despite Africa's significant legislative and institutional framework developments, collective bargaining remains underdeveloped. As a contribution to the theoretical discourse on collective bargaining in South Africa, this thesis addresses the question: In what ways can collective bargaining support the viability of corporations while securing employment in the changing world of work? It suggests a need to look into various aspects that contribute to business sustainability within the collective bargaining landscape, which is adequately linked to job security, growth, the development of businesses, and strengthening industrial relations. The study adopted a qualitative research method to outline and combine such aspects using doctrinal, open-ended research questionnaires (based on desktop research) and comparative research methods. The thesis further contributes to an understanding that employers and employees have conflicting interests in employment relations. The thesis argues that while businesses seek to make returns, employees also seek fair wages to satisfy their human needs. The findings further show that collective bargaining plays a vital role in the sustainability of a business by negotiating in good faith and recognising and reconciling various parties' interests. Additionally, collective bargaining can be used by employers and employees to ease the movement of skills development in the changing world of work in which the partnership between humans and machines is inevitable because the growing adoption of artificial intelligence will shape the future of work. The purpose of this thesis is to give clarity as to how collective bargaining can continue to serve its purpose in the changing world of work. To this end, the thesis is valuable in that it contributes to a deeper understanding of other relevant aspects of collective bargaining in the world of work