Failure and Strategic Projects: Australias Asia-Pacific Vision

This paper uses Australia’s 1980s shift to a new accumulation strategy of ‘international competitiveness’ to examine the role of failure in shaping state strategic projects. The paper argues that the Australian strategy’s gradual shift from an interventionist to a market-led orientation played out in competing representations of failure. Whether particular policies were perceived as failures depended not only on their material effects, but also on the ways in which failure was defined and on the values underpinning those definitions. As representations of failure establish the boundaries between the incremental adaptations that stabilise an accumulation strategy and the more radical failures characteristic of crisis, they illuminate how processes of discursive selectivity ‘fix’ state projects’ temporal, scalar and spatial dimension

INDUSTRIAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE CRISIS: An Empirical Analysis of Industrial Policies in France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. CES Open Forum Series 2018-2019, 2019

This paper gauges the forces and structures that shape economic transformation through an analysis of industrial polices in four European economies since the 2008 crisis: France, Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom. We argue that differences across recent European industrial policies respond to variations in national historical and institutional legacies; the characteristics of productive structures and the capabilities of the state. Pathdependency shapes views regarding the acceptable role of the state, although institutional legacies need to be balanced against historical institutional consistency and the intensity of the crisis. The characteristics of industry in terms of size, specialization, and position in the global division of labor affect preferences for framework versus sector-specific policies and the ambitiousness of goals. Finally, the state’s coordination capacity is essential to the design and efficient implementation of interrelated actions across multiple areas whereas financial capacity establishes commitment, signals priorities, and determines the feasibility of forward-looking projects

Role of Regional Healthcare Coalitions in Managing and Coordinating Disaster Response

A white paper prepared for the January 23-24, 2013 workshop on Nationwide Response to an Improvised Nuclear Device Attack, hosted by the Institute of Medicine’s Forum on Medical and Public Health Preparedness for Catastrophic Events together with the National Association of County and City Health Officials

AI Governance and the Policymaking Process: Key Considerations for Reducing AI Risk

This essay argues that a new subfield of AI governance should be explored that examines the policy-making process and its implications for AI governance. A growing number of researchers have begun working on the question of how to mitigate the catastrophic risks of transformative artificial intelligence, including what policies states should adopt. However, this essay identifies a preceding, meta-level problem of how the space of possible policies is affected by the politics and administrative mechanisms of how those policies are created and implemented. This creates a new set of key considerations for the field of AI governance and should influence the action of future policymakers. This essay examines some of the theories of the policymaking process, how they compare to current work in AI governance, and their implications for the field at large and ends by identifying areas of future research

Knowledge and Blameworthiness

Blameworthiness of an agent or a coalition of agents is often defined in terms of the principle of alternative possibilities: for the coalition to be responsible for an outcome, the outcome must take place and the coalition should have had a strategy to prevent it. In this article we argue that in the settings with imperfect information, not only should the coalition have had a strategy, but it also should have known that it had a strategy, and it should have known what the strategy was. The main technical result of the article is a sound and complete bimodal logic that describes the interplay between knowledge and blameworthiness in strategic games with imperfect information

Global Risks 2014, Ninth Edition.

The Global Risks 2014 report highlights how global risks are not only interconnected but also have systemic impacts. To manage global risks effectively and build resilience to their impacts, better efforts are needed to understand, measure and foresee the evolution of interdependencies between risks, supplementing traditional risk-management tools with new concepts designed for uncertain environments. If global risks are not effectively addressed, their social, economic and political fallouts could be far-reaching, as exemplified by the continuing impacts of the financial crisis of 2007-2008

Picking Up the Pieces After a Successful Implementation: Networks, Coalitions and ERP Systems

The empirical focus of our paper is an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system implemented in a major University, itself formed by the merger of two independent establishments in October 2004. We found that the new ERP system replaced existing legacy systems for political as well as functional reasons. Within the University setting, we identified three distinct networks containing powerful actors who influenced and dictated the outcome of the ISD project. We show how an effective coalition between top management and the software supplier was able to transform the administrative structures of the University and inscribe the organizational new arrangement with the software. However, this was achieved by marginalizing the end users who were left to cope alone with many of the inadequacies of the new system through improvisation

Contending cultures of counterterrorism: transatlantic divergence or convergence?

Terrorist attacks on the United States, Spain and the United Kingdom have underlined the differing responses of Europe and the United States to the 'new terrorism'. This article analyses these responses through the prism of historically determined strategic cultures. For the last four years the United States has directed the full resources of a 'national security' approach towards this threat and has emphasized unilateralism. Europe, based on its own past experience of terrorism, has adopted a regulatory approach pursued through multilateralism. These divergences in transatlantic approaches, with potentially major implications for the future of the relationship, have appeared to be mitigated by a revised American strategy of counterterrorism that has emerged during 2005. However, this article contends that while strategic doctrines may change, the more immutable nature of strategic culture will make convergence difficult. This problem will be compounded by the fact that neither Europe nor America have yet addressed the deeper connections between terrorism and the process of globalization