Goodbye Bismarck? : the foreign policy of contemporary Germany

This essay examines the foreign policy discourse in contemporary Germany. In reviewing a growing body of publications by German academics and foreign policy analysts, it identifies five schools of thought based on different worldviews, assumptions about international politics, and policy recommendations. These schools of thought are then related to, first, actual preferences held by German policymakers and the public more generally and, second, to a small set of grand strategies that Germany could pursue in the future. It argues that the spectrum of likely choices is narrow, with the two most probable-the strategies of "Wider West" and "Carolingian Europe"---continuing the multilateral and integrationist orientation of the old Federal Republic. These findings are contrasted with diverging assessments in the non-German professional literature.Finally, the essay sketches avenues for future research by suggesting ways for broadening the study of country-specific grand strategies, developing and testing inclusive typologies of more abstract foreign policy strategies, and refining the analytical tools in examining foreign policy discourses in general

From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design

As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain "ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources, environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c

Community Benefits Agreements and Comprehensive Planning: Balancing Community Empowerment and the Police Power

Traditionally, the states have empowered local governments to develop plans and implement regulations for neighborhood and community development. When accomplished at the local or regional level, the interests and benefits of the community as a whole are to be weighed against the detriments to individuals. Much has been studied and written about the lack of meaningful public participation in the planning and land use regulatory process, suggesting that often low-income and minority communities are not fully engaged in the process, even when it may result in decisions negatively impacting their neighborhoods. Case studies have also shown that governments are sometimes so eager to stimulate local economic development that they fail to fully engage communities in the project review process, both to expedite development and to avoid confronting local opposition. This emphasis on short-term economic growth, however, may obscure a local government’s perception of the social and environmental needs of particular communities. When this occurs, formal planning processes have failed to accomplish their goals of engaging community members and guiding future growth in a manner that maximizes long-term benefits for the common good. New approaches to planning provide one response to systemic public participation problems. The environmental justice movement, for example, has sought to ensure a fair distribution of both environmental burdens and environmental goods by requiring local governments to make meaningful public participation available to all community members. Community based planning efforts have attempted to improve the planning process by focusing on small and distinct geographic areas and by developing collaborative and inclusive planning programs. Since the late 1990s, community benefits agreements (CBAs) have offered another method to increase community input in the development planning and review process. For communities that have historically been excluded from the planning process, CBAs can be a powerful tool to ensure that neighborhood interests are addressed as an integral component of development. The result, ideally, is growth and development that is accountable to the people it affects and equitable in its distribution of benefits and burdens. However, the people it affects are often a small subset of the municipal jurisdiction and the equitable distribution sought in the CBAs is limited to the proposed project area. This article explores how the comprehensive planning process and CBAs complement and contradict each other, and how both could be improved by innovative and more inclusive planning techniques. Part II provides a brief historical background on comprehensive planning and community development, including issues relating to community planning and public participation. Part III examines CBAs and their role in community empowerment, community development and the promotion of social justice principles, including equitable development. This part also provides examples of typical land use related elements found in existing CBAs. Using these examples, Part IV segues into a discussion regarding whether private CBAs usurp the public planning process. The section explores whether CBAs are just another type of community based plan and whether CBAs advance narrow interests at the expense of the larger community. The question of what local governments should do when presented with a CBA that is inconsistent with the local comprehensive land use plan is examined to determine whether amending the plan to incorporate the community vision as articulated through the CBA is appropriate. The article concludes in Part V by pointing out that shortcomings of the current regulatory system allow local governments, intentionally or inadvertently, to exclude robust public participation from the development and implementation of comprehensive land use plans. This provides the impetus for privately negotiated CBAs, but these agreements may not always be ideal because not all parties to a CBA will have the best interests of the neighborhood or the community as a whole at the forefront of their agendas. While many CBAs have been successful, a number of case studies also reveal pitfalls in the process. The article concludes with the belief that local governments must be more inclusive and accountable in the public planning process to better meet the true goals of the community benefits movement

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Trust Signals in the eHealth Sector: A Multi-Stakeholder Approach

The Internet gives patients the opportunity to be better informed, have ownership over their data, and, therefore, be empowered in the medical decision-making process. All of these new forms of patient empowerment through eHealth, however, require the patients’ trust in online service. Existing literature provides a solid foundation regarding the development of trust in social encounters. What is more, the understanding of trust related to more general online services, such as e-commerce is advanced, too. Regarding eHealth in particular, however, there are substantial gaps in the literature. What is more, all existing studies have one pitfall in common. None of them investigates trust as a reciprocal, evolving system that is based on recurring interactions between trustee and truster. Studies either focus on the individual view of the trustee or the truster but fail to analyse the potential dynamics of a trust signal and its evolution. This led me to research questions that aim to identify trust-evoking factors specific to eHealth, on the one hand, and develop an understanding of the evolution and sustainability of communication between trustee and truster. I applied a mixed-methods approach in order to answer my research questions. This allowed me to use qualitative methods to explore a variety of trust antecedents that are unique to eHealth, develop hypotheses, and then test the derived hypotheses through a quantitative study. One surprising insight of this study is that the risk perception of the overall service offer can determine the level of trust in a service even before entering the website. Risk perception proved to be a more crucial indicator of perceived trustworthiness than presence of trust signals on the website. This allows the conclusion that both researchers and policy makers should differentiate between high-risk and low-risk eHealth services instead of approaching all services under the unifying umbrella of eHealth. Another key finding is that users judge the trustworthiness of eHealth websites depending on their “fit”. For eHealth providers that means that in order to increase trust in their service they need to mimic the offline experience as much as possible

Do Qualitative Data Help in Addressing Central American Violence? Research Note on Data Collection

Taking as its point of departure debates on the value of criminal statistics and victimization surveys, this article explores the methodological challenge of an alternative approach to Central American violence(s). How can we collect qualitative data that help address the social construction of (in)security? The research project “Public Spaces and Violence in Central America” used multiple data sources, including guided interviews and pupils’ essays. Drawing on research experience in Nicaragua, this paper asks, How can we collect data that reveal lifeworld experiences as well as hegemonic and counter-discourses on violence? Why is it crucial to keep a research diary? What is a “failed” or a “good” interview? This article argues for a research design based on theoretical considerations, impulsiveness and, most notably, constant self-reflection.Central America, violence, insecurity, qualitative research, methodological problems, discourse analysis