Deliberation behind closed doors: transparency and lobbying in the European Union [by Daniel Naurin]

This book makes a refreshingly empirical contribution to discussions of the European Union and its democratic deficit, specifically on the possible role of increased transparency in alleviating the latter. Naurin rightly challenges us to think about transparency and its effects – to ‘take transparency seriously’ rather than merely assume its panacea-like effects for European Union democracy and legitimacy. With this in mind, Naurin’s work focuses on investigating what deliberative democracy theorists label the civilizing effect of publicity

An inter-disciplinary methodology for researching benefit-sharing as a norm diffusing in global environmental law

This paper proposes a methodology for an interdisciplinary, empirical enquiry into the diffusion of the legal concept of ‘benefit-sharing’. The paper draws together accounts of norm diffusion from sociology, international relations and law to devise a theoretical approach for the empirical research of global environmental law. Against this background, the paper explores the usefulness of process-tracing, the relevance of frames and the need for a participatory action research approach for a research project focused on benefit-sharing as a tool to operationalize equity among and within States

Symposium on Sidney Tarrow's war, states and contention. An Introduction and brief thoughts on the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta

Sidney Tarrow’s book, the subject of this symposium, takes inspiration from the work of Charles Tilly. Tilly, as Tarrow points out in the introduction to the book, saw states and war as mutually constitutive, each changing the other and causing develop- ments through negotiations between citizens and authorities. Tarrow extends the point: “When states make war, this changes internal contention and thus the nature of the future state” (p. 7). To delve into how contention and the state constitute one another around wars, the book discusses three processes: mobilization for war, war- making and the conflicts that arise after wars end: the role of political contention at these different points forms the focus of the accounts contained in the book

In the corridors and in the streets: a comparative study of the impacts of social movement campaigns in the EU

Abstrac

An interdisciplinary model for mapping the Normative diffusion of fair and equitable benefit-sharing

Fair and equitable benefit-sharing is emerging in various areas of international environmental law (biodiversity, oceans, climate change, water, food and agriculture), as well as in international processes on human rights and corporate accountability. Benefit-sharing seeks to fairly and equitably allocate economic as well as socio-cultural and environmental advantages arising from the conservation and sustainable use of natural resources, or from their regulation, among different stakeholders. Notwithstanding mounting evidence that benefit-sharing is emerging in different areas of international law, varying understandings of the concept are articulated and no systematic study discusses its evolution and diffusion. This paper proposes norm diffusion as a lens for understanding how fair and equitable benefit-sharing is articulated in different sites, and discusses mechanisms, frames and actors in an interdisciplinary perspective by drawing on literature from sociology, international relations and law. A model for mapping norm diffusion in a dynamic way, considering whether actors, mechanisms and paths are active or passive, formal or informal, top-down, bottom-up or horizontal is proposed. Framing is discussed as crucial to understanding the content and embeddedness of a norm. The article uncovers underlying similarities in work on norm diffusion across the disciplines considered, and reflects on the value of an interdisciplinary approach that encourages legal scholars to consider the implications of power structures in the diffusion of law, while the nuances of legal knowledge may lead other social scientists to revisit accepted findings on norm diffusion. An in-depth understanding of how benefit-sharing is diffusing is argued to be an indispensible step before an informed assessment of its potential to promote the protection and sustainable use of natural resources in a fair and equitable manner in the face of power asymmetries

What We Talk about When We Talk about 'Local' Participation in International Biodiversity Law. The Changing Scope of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities' Participation under the Convention on Biological Diversity

This article explores the meaning of participation by indigenous peoples and local communities' in the Decisions of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) from the perspectives of civic and radical environmentalism. The first sees participation as key for just and effective decision-making. Radical environmentalism argues instead for fundamental transformation to address environmental crisis. The article contributes to discussions about the importance of indigenous peoples and local communities for better and more just policies, or whether a more radical approach is necessary. The research uses empirical findings to deepen our understanding of 'local' participation under the CBD and uncovers many meanings. Most describe mechanisms for participation, suggesting scope for civic environmentalism. Yet a closer look raises a range of questions, leading to suggestions for future action and research

Knowledge Action Repertoires and the Outcomes of Collective Action: Local Community Action for Environmental Protection

The article uses the knowledge practice repertoire approach, combined with an integrated opportunity approach, to investigate the role that local community knowledge based on holistic worldviews plays in the formation of collective actors, action and outcomes. This is argued to be crucial given that environmental governance is shaped instead by knowledge based on a worldview of a nature/culture divide, and that local community knowledge is key to responding to the planetary crisis and subject to this potential ontological clash. Attention to local community collective action using this lens can shed light on whether and how spaces can be made for different approaches, giving a fresh view to how outcomes matter. The article presents two case studies of local community collective action through community protocols from South Africa and Argentina. Community protocols are documents, recognised in international environmental law, where local communities set out their worldviews, their traditional knowledge and practices in support of environmental protection, and link these to rights and protections in national and international law as a basis for collective action. They are thus ideal sites for investigating knowledge practices and ontological politics. Focusing on different types of knowledge practices and opportunity contexts helped to untangle the complex question of how outcomes mattered to the local communities in these cases

Challenging power asymmetries from the bottom up? Community protocols and the convention on biological diversity at the global/local crossroads. BENELEX Working Paper No. 11

Community protocols are documents, or otherwise recorded artefacts, that record the existing practices, rights and future visions of local groups as regards their natural resources. As such, they have been recognised within the framework of the Convention on Biological Diversity in its Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-Sharing as one tool that allows local groups to define issues around benefit-sharing. Literature on community protocols is emerging, and work in a number of areas (including global environmental politics, political ecology and socio-legal studies) touches on issues relevant to them. Reflections on the connections amongst these areas are missing however. This article seeks to bring their insights into conversation by reflecting on community protocols both as transpositions of global processes into local realities, and as holding the potential to shape global processes. The article considers how community protocols may address unequal power relations at the local, national and international levels, and their limitations in this respect. A number of core discourses are identified in the existing literature to characterise global and local environmental policies. These discourses guide a consideration of how community protocols may address power relations, and the potential pitfalls they may encounter. Overall, the article finds that there is a delimited space where community protocols may contribute to create spaces for dialogue between actors with diverging understandings of the world. Yet many threats exist to the creation of such spaces, stemming both from how communities are defined and from where the impetus for community protocols comes from: if these processes become externally imposed rather than community-driven their potential to tackle power relations will be compromised

Tenth Anniversary Edition of Partecipazione e Conflitto.

PARTECIPAZIONE E CONFLITTO [Participation and Conflict] was created in 2008, the first journal in Italy to specialize in work analyzing political and social participation. The journal was to be open to interdisciplinary work, internationally oriented, and founded on rigorous criteria for review. 10 years later in 2018, we believe we have respected that aim. In Italy, PaCo is a touchstone for work on contentious politics, political participation and grassroots mobilization in Europe, and is steadily becoming more and more international. In the introduction to our first issue we described the journal as “an ambitious project born of the need to create an autonomous arena for debate dedicated to the study of the dynamics of transformation of contemporary political systems, with a specific focus on the analysis of participation and the political and social conflicts that characterize this. A journal not only about participation, but about political and social studies that place aspects of participation at their core, in all their intrinsic ambivalences, in their constitutive link to the dynamics of conflict”. We invited research and studies that focused on the transformations of politics and its principal actors: parties, interest groups, trade unions, social movements, associations, sub-cultural and counter-cultural communities, citizens’ committees and other forms of more or less formally organized actors “from below”. We sought work that investigated the processes of democratization and new forms of democratic participation in a participatory vein, but also on the ways in which spaces for collective action were being squeezed, and dynamics of identity closure; on spaces opening up or closing down, on new forms of governance at local, national or supranational level, without forgetting those forms of participation and conflict that challenge, in more or less radical ways, the political, social, economic and cultural foundations of contemporary societies