Cardboard Coffins and Vaults of Gold: Debt, Obligation and Scandal in Ecuador's Response to Covid-19

Abstract As the first cases of COVID-19 appeared in Guayaquil—foreshadowing one of world's most devastating outbreaks—the Ecuadorian government paid $324 billion to bondholders, while forgoing much needed investment in pandemic preparation. This was the opening round for a series of struggles over the costs of containment and treatment of the virus; conflicts over debts foreign and domestic, taxes and corruption, wages and working conditions, and the control of public space. While the pandemic provided a context for the renegotiation of public and social obligations, however, the outcome was that the burden of pandemic containment was placed on those least able to sustain it— especially precariously employed, informal sector workers—deepening existing inequalities at the cost of lives and livelihoods. This paper addresses how this process was manifested through controversies in public culture, including traditional and social media, finding that the predominance of middle class and elite interests and preoccupations— together with the prevalence of scandal as a genre—sidelined the defense of popular lives and livelihoods and reinforcing systemic inequalities

Bridging Certification and Community Forestry through NTFPs: A Case Study from Nepal

Issue - For a variety of reasons, community forestry is not always well suited to existing forest certification schemes. Using the case of Nepal, this paper considers the extent to which promoting the trade in nontimber forest products can complement, or even provide an alternative to, forest certification for timber while promoting sustainable community forestry. The paper develops recent work on the interaction of transnational business governance (TBG) schemes to suggest how these two approaches to sustainable forest management can work together productively

Patching vs Packaging: Complementary Effects, Goodness of Fit, Degrees of Freedom and Intentionality in Policy ...

10.2139/ssrn.22733421-2

Patching vs Packaging in Policy Formulation: Complementary Effects, Goodness of Fit, Degrees of Freedom, and Feasibility in Policy Portfolio Design

Thinking about policy mixes is at the forefront of current research work in the policy sciences and raises many significant questions with respect to policy tools and instruments, processes of policy formulation, and the evolution of tool choices over time. Not least among these is how to assess the potential for multiple policy tools to achieve policy goals in an efficient and effective way. Previous conceptual work on policy mixes has highlighted evaluative criteria such as "consistency" (the ability of multiple policy tools to reinforce rather than undermine each other in the  pursuit of individual policy goals), "coherence" (or the ability of multiple policy goals to co-exist with each other in a logical fashion), and 'congruence" (or the ability of multiple goals and instruments to work together in a uni-directional or mutually supportive fashion) as important design principles and measures of optimality in policy mixes. And previous empirical work on the evolution of existing policy mixes has highlighted how these three criteria are often lacking in mixes which have evolved over time as well as those which have otherwise been consciously designed. This paper revisits this early design work in order to more clearly assess the reasons why many existing policy mixes are sub-optimal and the consequences this has for thinking about policy formulation processes and the practices of policy design

Pathogenic Politics: Authoritarianism, Inequality, and Capitalism in the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract We provide an introduction to this special issue on the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, presenting some of the key findings and central arguments of the articles collected herein, and discussing their significance in relation to the broader political context of the pandemic. We address the roles of necropolitics and "necrosecurity", pointing to their relationships to colonial and eugenicist histories, as well as some of the ways in which a globally-ascendant authoritarian populism contributed to the often-disastrous mismanagement of the pandemic. We consider how unequal structures of social and public obligation were reproduced to the detriment of lives and livelihoods, and the challenges facing institutions of protection, care, and social reproduction. Finally, we consider some of the ways in which the pandemic may have opened up avenues for more systemic transformations—for good or for ill

Transitioning to sustainability in Saskatchewan power production

This paper hypothesizes the future of Saskatchewan power production based on the theory of transition management. Power generation law and policy in Saskatchewan over the last century to the present is analyzed as a key component of a socio-technical regime. Understanding the legacy of law and policy is important given sustainability concerns and the realization that significant changes will be required in trajectories of development putting less strain on natural capital and ecosystem services. This paper examines the critical relationship between governance strategies at the macro socio and political landscape level and the particular policy mix that is found in the socio-technical regime of power generation in Saskatchewan. This exercise is informed by transition management theory and also the alternative explanations of path dependency. Switch points critical to the trajectory of power generation development are identified and used to illustrate and assess the plausibility of these theoretical concepts. Current landscape developments in Saskatchewan, including the emergence of concerns for human-induced climate change, the development of wind power and even the re-emergence of nuclear power generation as a policy option, may facilitate a transition towards greater sustainability. These sustainability paths are juxtaposed against the development of Saskatchewan’s oil sands and the development of carbon capture sequestration technology. Possible future alternative pathways to sustainable power production are outlined and critiqued in the current Saskatchewan governance context

The neglect of governance in forest sector vulnerability assessments: Structural-functionalism and “black box” problems in climate change adaptation planning

Efforts to develop extensive forest-based climate change vulnerability assessments have informed proposed management and policy options intended to promote improved on-the-ground policy outcomes. These assessments are derived from a rich vulnerability literature and are helpful in modeling complex ecosystem interactions, yet their policy relevance and impact has been limited. We argue this is due to structural-functional logic underpinning these assessments in which governance is treated as a procedural “black box” and policy-making as an undifferentiated and unproblematic output of a political system responding to input changes and/or system prerequisites. Like an earlier generation of systems or cybernetic thinking about political processes, the focus in these assessments on macro system-level variables and relationships fails to account for the multi-level or polycentric nature of governance and the possibility of policy processes resulting in the nonperformance of critical tasks

Shifting Mandates and Climate Change Policy Capacity: The Forestry Case

The original hypothesis is that forests will be a policy subsector in which the challenges of climate change adaptation lead to broader policy mandates but that the declining role of the industry in the Canadian economy will cause departmental resources to be stable or decreasing. The result will be ineffective policy capacity, leading to adaptation policies that are poorly designed, incomplete or missing altogether. This paper provides some evidence to support this hypothesis, though the situation is complicated by the dominant role played by the provinces in both ownership and jurisdiction. While the leading federal department, Natural Resources Canada, has shed other mandates to focus on climate change, provincial agencies are already caught between the added costs of addressing climate change impacts, notably wildfire, and the need to plan for and implement long term adaptive policies with stable or declining resources. Much will depend on coordination between First Nations, the provinces and the federal government in a policy subsector with a history of conflict between the different orders of government

A New Way of Doing Politics : The Movement against CAFTA in Costa Rica

In October of 2007, Costa Ricans voted in a referendum to ratify a Free Trade Agreement with the United States (DR-CAFTA, or CAFTA). The first referendum in their nation\u27s history--and the first referendum ever held on a Free Trade Agreement--marked the culmination of a cycle of contention over liberalization that transformed practices and expectations of politics in a country often considered an exemplar of representative democracy. In this dissertation I provide an account of the opposition to CAFTA (the NO), based on two years of ethnographic research with the Patriotic Committees (Comites Patrioticos), the decentralized, grassroots network at the heart of the movement against the treaty. I emphasize the contested meanings of democracy invoked in the struggle between the grassroots NO campaign and the transnational elite coalition that promoted the treaty (the SI). I argue that the opposition to CAFTA in Costa Rica was a movement to defend the “social state” (Estado social) against a globalizing neoliberal property regime, while challenging existing forms of political representation in the name of a more authentic popular democracy. I show how the struggle over CAFTA was shaped by an ongoing process of contention over liberalization and representation in the context of Costa Rica\u27s particular social democratic institutions and traditions. I argue that, as the struggle evolved, the SI and the NO appealed to different aspects of the country\u27s “institutionality” (institucionalidad), raising some fundamental contradictions within and between liberalism and democracy. One outcome was a controversial and ambiguous popular consultation, an exercise in “direct democracy” that paradoxically highlighted the limits of an elite-dominated political order. Drawing on theory and scholarship of populism and direct democracy, I show how protagonists of the NO turned a diversity of interests into unity of purpose, enabling them to nearly win a markedly asymmetrical contest. I also explain how the Patriotic Committees worked with established social idioms to pioneer new forms of political participation as they challenged the limits of existing representative institutions. I argue that in doing say they articulated a conception of democracy and social state that makes a distinctive contribution to discussions of post-neoliberalism