Governance and the transformation of political representation

About the book: There has been an explosion of new forms of governance as societies adapt to economic, social and political change. This book highlights the dynamics of the social, cultural and institutional practices involved in 'remaking' governance. It is structured around three key themes: the remaking of peoples, publics and politics

Understanding Opportunities in Social Entrepreneurship: A Critical Realist Abstraction

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This paper extends social entrepreneurship (SE) research by drawing upon a critical realist perspective to analyse dynamic structure/agency relations in SE opportunity emergence, illustrated by empirical evidence. Our findings demonstrate an agential aspect (opportunity actualisation following a path-dependent seeding-growing-shaping process) and a structural aspect (institutional, cognitive and embedded structures necessary for SE opportunity emergence) related to SE opportunities. These structures provide three boundary conditions for SE agency: institutional discrimination, an SE belief system and social feasibility. Within this paper, we develop a novel theoretical framework to analyse SE opportunities plus, an applicable tool to advance related empirical research

A qualitative enquiry into OpenStreetMap making

Based on a case study on the OpenStreetMap community, this paper provides a contextual and embodied understanding of the user-led, user-participatory and user-generated produsage phenomenon. It employs Grounded Theory, Social Worlds Theory, and qualitative methods to illuminate and explores the produsage processes of OpenStreetMap making, and how knowledge artefacts such as maps can be collectively and collaboratively produced by a community of people, who are situated in different places around the world but engaged with the same repertoire of mapping practices. The empirical data illustrate that OpenStreetMap itself acts as a boundary object that enables actors from different social worlds to co-produce the Map through interacting with each other and negotiating the meanings of mapping, the mapping data and the Map itself. The discourses also show that unlike traditional maps that black-box cartographic knowledge and offer a single dominant perspective of cities or places, OpenStreetMap is an embodied epistemic object that embraces different world views. The paper also explores how contributors build their identities as an OpenStreetMaper alongside some other identities they have. Understanding the identity-building process helps to understand mapping as an embodied activity with emotional, cognitive and social repertoires

Explaining Aboriginal Treaty Negotiations Outcomes in Canada: The Cases of the Inuit and the Innu in Labrador

From 1921 to the early 1970s, the federal government refused to negotiate any new land claims agreements with aboriginal peoples in Canada. In 1973, in Calder, a majority of the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed the existence of aboriginal title. The Court ruled that aboriginal title was not a creation of the Crown, but rather stemmed from aboriginal possession of ancestral lands from time immemorial (Macklem, 2001: 268–269). Six months after Calder, the federal government invited aboriginal groups who had not yet signed a treaty with the Crown to enter into negotiations with them under a new federal comprehensive land claims process (RCAP, 1996: 533; Scholtz, 2006: 68–71). This process, which still exists today, is designed to replace undefined aboriginal rights with a new set of specific treaty rights. To do so, aboriginal groups must prove to the federal and provincial governments that their rights to their claimed lands have never been extinguished; that they traditionally and currently occupy and use their lands largely to the exclusion of other groups; and that they are a clearly identifiable and recognizable aboriginal group (INAC, 1998). Once this is accomplished the three parties negotiate a Framework Agreement, setting out the process, the issues and the timeline for negotiations. Once a Framework Agreement is achieved, the parties negotiate a non-legally binding Agreement-in-Principle (AIP), and then a Final Agreement. The Final Agreement must be signed and ratified by all three parties. In 1977, the Inuit and the Innu in Labrador each submitted statements of intent to the federal and provincial governments to begin comprehensive land claims negotiations. On 22 January 2005, the Labrador Inuit Association (LIA) and the governments of Canada and Newfoundland and Labrador concluded 28 years of negotiations by signing the Labrador Inuit Land Claims Agreement. The Innu, however, are nowhere near to completing their agreement. Although the Innu were able to complete a Framework Agreement in 1996, an Agreement-in-Principle (AIP) remains elusive. What explains this variation in comprehensive land claims (CLC) negotiation outcomes? The common explanation among politicians, bureaucrats, negotiators and observers is that a large-scale economic development project is a necessary condition to “get a deal.” This paper challenges this explanation by looking at two separate cases located in the same province and virtually ignored by the literature: the Inuit and the Innu in Labrador. To do so, this paper relies on primary and secondary sources, including 28 interviews with Innu, Inuit, and federal and provincial politicians, negotiators, bureaucrats, lawyers, elders, advisors and citizens from Nain, Makkovik, Natuashish, Sheshatshiu, North West River, Happy Valley-Goose Bay, St. John’s, Cornerbrook and Ottawa.1 The main findings of this paper are that a set of internal and external factors relative to the First Nation provides a better explanation for: (a) whether a CLC negotiation outcome is obtained; and (b) at what speed an outcome is obtained

Social Decision-Making under Scientific Controversy, Expertise, and the Precautionary Principle

Integrating scientific inputs into the regulatory process is generally attributed to experts. But, environmental issues are often characterised by an all-pervasive uncertainty and scientific and social controversies which make the experts' task difficult. This paper presents the concept of social decision-making under scientific controversy and comes to an examination of the implicit but decisive roles expected from expertise in those contexts. It also gives some examples of misunderstandings about the very nature of scientific statements. Since a new principle, the Precautionary Principle, is said to bring appropriate responses to uncertainty, we examine the change in the course of relationship between science and decision-making it may have and we test its operational capability to solve decision problems on a scientific basis. Our conclusion is that in controversial contexts, the Principle has no definite content and is not able to frame a scientifically determined hierarchy of options. So, to have it reasonably translated to deal with practical matters, some effort is expected from scientific communities : they should organise a collective validation of their expertise, distinct from the organisation of expertise by public administrations. This expertise by scientists should consider with due attention the process of formulation of assumptions and building conjectural possibilities, so as to define the boundaries of relevance for action and to establish some gradual scale in the qualification of scientific products which may authorise gradual precautionary measures to be taken.regulatory decision making ; climat policy

Understanding the changing nature of sports organisations in transforming societies

The paper examined the process of changing in three Bulgarian national sport organisations (NSO) in swimming, weightlifting and field hockey, as the country is undergoing fundamental political, economic and social transformations from state socialism (1945-1989) to democratisation (1990-present). Drawing on the contextualist approach to organisational change (Pettigrew, 1985) the study was concerned with understanding long-term processes in their context. Analysed were NSOs’ conceptual orientation, structures, resources, capabilities and outcomes. Changing was unveiled through the interplay between three levels of analysis - wider political and economic, sport sector, and organisation-specific. The history of changing unfolded over a 25 years period and followed three stages of crisis of governability (1980-1989), crisis displacement (1989-1997) and identity search (1998-2004). Changing was determined by tensions generated in the previous socialist sport system, the new forces in the NSOs’ context, and by managers’ interpretation of events, and was a discovery process. The three NSOs followed different change patterns of shrinking, insulation and expansion. Two key reasons were responsible for those differences - the institualisation of the broader political and sport sector contexts, and NSOs’ choice to pursue narrow elitism (specialism) or the broader aims of sports development (generalism). The contextualist approach allowed us to appreciate the historical, contextual and processual nature of changing and to discuss the role of managers and various forces in shaping its course and outcomes