Towards durable multistakeholder-generated solutions: The pilot application of a problem-oriented policy learning protocol to legality verification and community rights in Peru

This paper reports and reflects on the pilot application of an 11-step policy learning protocol that was developed by Cashore and Lupberger (2015) based on several years of Cashore’s multi-author collaborations. The protocol was applied for the first time in Peru in 2015 and 2016 by the IUFRO Working Party on Forest Policy Learning Architectures (hereinafter referred to as the project team). The protocol integrates insights from policy learning scholarship (Hall 1993, Sabatier 1999) with Bernstein and Cashore’s (2000, 2012) four pathways of influence framework. The pilot implementation in Peru focused on how global timber legality verification interventions might be harnessed to promote local land rights. Legality verification focuses attention on the checking and auditing of forest management units in order to verify that timber is harvested and traded in compliance with the law. We specifically asked: How can community legal ownership of, and access to, forestland and forest resources be enhanced? The protocol was designed as a dynamic tool, the implementation of which fosters iterative rather than linear processes. It directly integrated two objectives: 1) identifying the causal processes through which global governance initiatives might be harnessed to produce durable results ‘on the ground’; 2) generating insights and strategies in collaboration with relevant stakeholders. This paper reviews and critically evaluates our work in designing and piloting the protocol. We assess what seemed to work well and suggest modifications, including an original diagnostic framework for nurturing durable change. We also assess the implications of the pilot application of the protocol for policy implementation that works to enhance the influence of existing international policy instruments, rather than contributing to fragmentation and incoherence by creating new ones

Reducing Uncertainty: Understanding the Information-Theoretic Origins of Consciousness

Ever since the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1996, 1995) first entered the scene in the debate over consciousness many have taken it to show the limitations of a scientific or naturalist explanation of consciousness. The hard problem is the problem of explaining why there is any experience associated with certain physical processes, that is, why there is anything it is like associated with such physical processes? The character of one’s experience doesn’t seem to be entailed by physical processes and so an explanation which can overcome such a worry must (1) explain how physical processes give rise to experience (explain the entailment), (2) give an explanation which doesn’t rely on such physical processes, or (3) show why the hard problem is misguided in some sense. Recently, a rather ambitious and novel theory of consciousness has entered the scene – Integrated Information Theory (IIT) of Consciousness (Oizumi et al., 2014; Tononi, 2008; Tononi et al., 2016) – and proposes that consciousness is the result of a specific type of information processing, what those developing the theory call integrated information. The central aim of this dissertation is to philosophically investigate IIT and see whether it has the ability to overcome the hard problem and related worries. I then aim to use this philosophical investigation to answer a set of related questions which guide this dissertation, which are the following: Is it possible to give an information-theoretic explanation of consciousness? What would the nature of such an explanation be and would it result in a novel metaphysics of consciousness? In this dissertation, I begin in chapter one by first setting up the hard problem and related arguments against the backdrop of IIT (Mindt, 2017). I show that given a certain understanding of structural and dynamical properties IIT fails to overcome the hard problem of consciousness. I go on in chapter two to argue that a deflationary account of causation is the best view for IIT to overcome the causal exclusion problem (Baxendale and Mindt, 2018). In chapter three, I explain IIT’s account of how the qualitative character of our experience arises (qualia) and what view of intentionality (the directedness of our mental states) IIT advocates. I then move on in chapter four to show why the hard problem mischaracterizes structural and dynamical properties and misses important nuances that may shed light on giving a naturalized explanation of consciousness. In the last and fifth chapter, I outline a sketch of a novel metaphysics of consciousness that takes the conjunction of Neutral Monism and Information-Theoretic Structural Realism to give what I call Information-Theoretic Neutral-Structuralism

Randomised controlled trials of complex interventions and large-scale transformation of services

Complex interventions and large-scale transformations of services are necessary to meet the health-care challenges of the 21st century. However, the evaluation of these types of interventions is challenging and requires methodological development. Innovations such as cluster randomised controlled trials, stepped-wedge designs, and non-randomised evaluations provide options to meet the needs of decision-makers. Adoption of theory and logic models can help clarify causal assumptions, and process evaluation can assist in understanding delivery in context. Issues of implementation must also be considered throughout intervention design and evaluation to ensure that results can be scaled for population benefit. Relevance requires evaluations conducted under real-world conditions, which in turn requires a pragmatic attitude to design. The increasing complexity of interventions and evaluations threatens the ability of researchers to meet the needs of decision-makers for rapid results. Improvements in efficiency are thus crucial, with electronic health records offering significant potential

Would Declining Exit Rates from Welfare Provide Evidence of Welfare Dependence in Homogeneous Environments?

Negative duration dependence in the exit rate from social assistance is an important issue addressed in the dynamic welfare participation literature. If heterogeneity is properly modelled, the decline of the exit rate is ascribed to a progressive reduction of the capability to get off welfare due to the detrimental effects of the benefit as time in welfare increases (Blank, 1989; Sandefur and Cook, 1998; Dahl and Lorenzen; 2003; Gangl, 2003, Chay et al, 2005). The aim of this paper is to show that the potential corruptive effects of benefits are not easily identified with this analytical strategy. As a starting point we develop a model, coherent with the Bane and Ellwood (1994) theoretical framework, that describes the causal links occurring between work/unemployment, poverty and social assistance. A simulation study is carried out in order to show that negative duration dependence in the exit rate from welfare may arise in environments where no corruptive effects of benefits are at work, even in the absence of heterogeneity at the onset of the process. Thus, negative duration dependence in the exit rate from welfare does not imply ‘welfare dependence’: the observed pattern may be due to effects of persistence in poverty or in unemployment.

Assumptions of IV Methods for Observational Epidemiology

Instrumental variable (IV) methods are becoming increasingly popular as they seem to offer the only viable way to overcome the problem of unobserved confounding in observational studies. However, some attention has to be paid to the details, as not all such methods target the same causal parameters and some rely on more restrictive parametric assumptions than others. We therefore discuss and contrast the most common IV approaches with relevance to typical applications in observational epidemiology. Further, we illustrate and compare the asymptotic bias of these IV estimators when underlying assumptions are violated in a numerical study. One of our conclusions is that all IV methods encounter problems in the presence of effect modification by unobserved confounders. Since this can never be ruled out for sure, we recommend that practical applications of IV estimators be accompanied routinely by a sensitivity analysis.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-STS316 the Statistical Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Investing in Well-being: An Analytical Framework

The NZ Treasury is currently engaged in a project to identify cost-effective interventions to improve outcomes for children and young adults in order to maximise the value of government expenditures across the social sector. The central aim of this paper is to provide an empirically-robust framework to compare intervention across a range of social sectors. There are two key components to the framework. The first is a life-course view of child development that emphasises that experiences and influences in childhood can affect well-being throughout life. The second component involves viewing social expenditures as investments addressed at achieving particular outcomes, typically directed at enhancing well-being. The paper presents evidence from a review of the literature on how the process and experiences of childhood have a later impact on wellbeing; how child development and outcomes are influenced by individual, family and communal factors and how risk and resilience can be used to indicate that an individual is at increased or decreased risk of negative outcomes. Case studies of youth suicide, teenage pregnancy, educational underachievement and youth inactivity provide evidence about what interventions work using key empirical findings from the literature.Well-being; social investment; life-course; child development; child and adult outcomes; portfolio; intervention

The Ecosystem Of Women\u27s Health Social Enterprises Based In The United States

The overall objective of this thesis research was to elucidate the ecosystem of women\u27s health social enterprises (WHSEs) based in the United States (U.S.). Aim I was to conduct a secondary data analysis of a random national sample of nonprofit WHSEs based in the U.S. regarding their characteristics and areas of intervention. Aim II was to conduct a qualitative assessment of a sample of women\u27s health social entrepreneurs based in the U.S. regarding their perspectives on the ecosystem of WHSEs. Aim I utilized the GuideStar database and assessed enterprise size, geographic location, financial distress, health intervention area, and health activity category using descriptive statistics, statistical tests, and multivariable regression analysis via SPSS. Aim II utilized in-depth interviewing and grounded theory analysis via MAXQDA 2018 to identify novel themes and core categories while using an established framework for mapping social enterprise ecosystems as a scaffold. Aim I findings suggest that WHSE activity is more predominant in the south region of the U.S. but not geographically concentrated around cities previously identified as social enterprise hubs. WHSEs take a comprehensive approach to women\u27s health, often simultaneously focusing on multiple areas of health interventions. Although most WHSEs demonstrate a risk for financial distress, very few exhibited severe risk. Risk for financial distress was not significantly associated with any of the measured enterprise characteristics. Aim II generated four core categories of findings that describe the ecosystem of WHSE: 1) comprehensive, community-based, and culturally adaptive care, 2) interdependent innovation in systems, finances, and communication, 3) interdisciplinary, cross-enterprise collaboration, and 4) women\u27s health as the foundation for family and population health. These findings are consistent with the three-failures theory for nonprofit organizations, particularly that WHSEs address government failure by focusing on the unmet women\u27s health needs of the underserved populations (in contrast to the supply of services supported by the median voter) and address the market failure of overexclusion through strategies such as cross-subsidization and price discrimination. While WHSEs operate with levels of financial risk and are subject to the voluntary sector failure of philanthropic insufficiency, the data also show that they act to remediate other threats of voluntary failure. Aim I findings highlight the importance of understanding financial performance of WHSEs. Also, lack of significant associations between our assessed enterprise characteristics and their financial risk suggests need for additional research to identify factors that influence financial performance of WHSE. Aim II findings show that WHSEs are currently engaged in complex care coordination and comprehensive biopsychosocial care for women and their families, suggesting that these enterprises may serve as a model for improving women\u27s health and healthcare. The community-oriented and interdisciplinary nature of WHSE as highlighted by our study may also serve as a unique approach for research and education purposes. Additional research on the ecosystem of WHSE is needed in order to better inform generalizability of our findings and to elucidate how WHSE interventions may be integrated into policies and practices to improve women\u27s health

towards a disaggregate approach to regime impacts on post-treaty Negotiations

In demonstrating that and how international regimes facilitate the convergence of foreign policy positions, analysts typically depart from irregularities at the macro-level and focus on beneficial effects for cooperation. This paper shows, with reference to the post-Treaty negotiations on an “Access and Benefit-Sharing” regime under the Convention on Biological Diversity, that standard approaches to substantiating regime effects on the output dimension fail to capture “perverse” regime impacts on perpetuating disagreement and “positive” effects that are overshadowed by malign conditions for cooperation. While this shortcoming may be acceptable in making a case for institutional causation across cases, it severely limits the analytical purview when the goal is the evaluation of a specific regime’s performance under historical circumstances. This paper outlines the contours of an alternative, more inclusive approach to the “output effectiveness” of international regimes. It firmly locates the analytical focus on the state level to investigate regime impacts on changes in foreign-policy making irrespectively of their implications for and impacts on collective action. By drawing on bargaining theory and foreign policy analysis, causal pathways for regime influence can eventually be formalised that would not only provide a standardised framework for tracing specific regime effects of varying quality, but also allow for their comparative assessment within the same research design