Social and governance dimensions of climate change : implications for policy

This paper addresses two vital concerns in the debate on adaptation to climate change. First, how can countries prepare to manage the impact of climate-change induced natural disasters? Second, how can countries ensure that they have the governmental institutions required to manage the phenomenal challenge of adaptation to climate change? A range of economic and institutional measures are tested for their potential effects on natural disaster resilience and the quality of environmental governance. The findings suggest an important role is played by social and political institutions in determining the ability of countries to adapt to climate change and respond to natural disasters, in particular in the degree to which countries have succeeded in gender empowerment and the development of a robust civil society and nonprofit sector. As the climate change challenge moves from that of"proving the facts"to that of"implementing change,"the authors suggest that international policymakers, donors, and activists must increasingly focus on building domestic policy environments that are conducive to the delivery of more effective environmental legislation, for example through implementation of gender quotas and provision of support to civil society groups.Environmental Economics&Policies,Population Policies,Natural Disasters,Governance Indicators,Hazard Risk Management

DEMOCRATIC DECONSOLIDATION IN DEVELOPED DEMOCRACIES, 1995-2018. CES Open Forum Series 2018-2019

Until recently, many political scientists had believed that the stability of democracy is assured once certain threshold conditions – prosperity, democratic legitimacy, the development of a robust civil society – were attained. Democracy would then be consolidated, and remain stable. In this article we show that levels of support for democratic governance are not stable over time, even among high-income democracies, and have declined in recent years. In contrast to theories of democratic consolidation, we suggest that just as democracy can come to be “the only game in town” through processes of democratic deepening and the broad-based acceptance of democratic institutions, so too a process of democratic deconsolidation can take place as citizens sour on democratic institutions, become more open to authoritarian alternatives, and vote for anti-system parties. Public opinion measures of democratic deconsolidation are strongly associated with subsequent declines in the actual extent of democratic governance and predict not only recent democratic backsliding in transitional democracies, such as Venezuela or Russia, but also anticipated the downgrades in Freedom House scores occurring across a range of western democracies since 2016

The Role of Social Institutions in Determining Aid Effectiveness

In recent years, scholars and policymakers have placed growing attention on the issue of aid effectiveness, that is, the efficiency of donor assistance in achieving stated economic and human development objectives. While research has tended to highlight the need for greater capacity building and improved governance as mechanisms to make aid 'effective', the social origins of such mechanisms have not been thoroughly examined. Using the latest cross- country indicator series on aid effectiveness from the OECD and the Indices of Social Development, hosted at the Institute of Social Studies in the Hague, this paper examines the determinants of effective aid spending, and finds a significant effect linking the quality of aid assistance to social institutions relating to public order and trust. These effects are verified when instrumenting social ins

The Weakness of Post-Communist Civil Society Reassessed. CES Papers - Open Forum #11, 2012

During the last two decades, scholars from a variety of disciplines have argued that civil society is structurally deficient in post-communist countries. Yet why have the seemingly strong, active and mobilized civic movements of the transition period become so weak after democracy was established? And why have there been diverging political trajectories across the post-communist space if civil society structures were universally weak? This paper uses a wide range of data from various available sources to show that civil societies in Central and Eastern European countries are not as feeble as is commonly assumed. Some post-communist countries possess vigorous public spheres, and active civil society organizations strongly connected to transnational civic networks able to shape domestic policies. Following the calls by Anheier (2004) and Bernhard and Karakoç (2007) we adopt a multidimensional approach to the measurement of civil society. In a series of cross-section timeseries models, we show that our broader measures of civic and social institutions are able to predict the diverging transition paths among post-communist regimes, and in particular the growing gap between democratic East Central Europe and the increasingly authoritarian post-Soviet space

Primary mediastinal lymphoma: diagnosis and treatment options.

Primary mediastinal large B-cell lymphoma (PMBCL) is a unique B-cell lymphoma variant that arises from a putative thymic medulla B cell. It constitutes 2-4% of non-Hodgkin lymphomas and occurs most frequently in young females. PMBCL is characterized by a diffuse proliferation of medium-to-large B cells associated with sclerosis. Molecular analysis shows that PMBCL is a distinct entity compared to other types of diffuse large B-cell lymphomas. PMBCL is characterized by a locally invasive anterior mediastinal bulky mass. The combination of rituximab with CHOP/CHOP-like regimens followed by mediastinal radiation therapy (RT) is associated with a 5-year progression-free survival of 75-85%. However, the role of consolidation RT still remains uncertain. More intensive regimens, such as DA-EPOCH-R without mediastinal RT, have shown very promising results. The conclusive role of PET-CT scan requires prospective studies and there is hope that this may allow to de-escalate RT and accordingly yield reliable prognostic information

Is now the time for molecular driven therapy for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma?

INTRODUCTION: Recent genetic and molecular discoveries regarding alterations in diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) deeply changed the approach to this lymphoproliferative disorder. Novel additional predictors of outcomes and new therapeutic strategies are being introduced to improve outcomes. Areas covered: This review aims to analyse the recent molecular discoveries in DLBCL, the rationale of novel molecular driven treatments and their impact on DLBCL prognosis, especially in ABC-DLBCL and High Grade B Cell Lymphoma. Pre-clinical and clinical evidences are reviewed to critically evaluate the novel DLBCL management strategies. Expert commentary: New insights in DLBCL molecular characteristics should guide the therapeutic approach; the results of the current studies which are investigating safety and efficacy of novel 'X-RCHOP' will probably lead, in future, to a cell of origin (COO) based upfront therapy. Moreover, it is necessary to identify early patients with DLBCL who carried MYC, BCL2 and/or BCL6 rearrangements double hit lymphomas (DHL) because they should not receive standard R-CHOP but high intensity treatment as reported in many retrospective studies. New prospective trials are needed to investigate the more appropriate treatment of DHL

Methodology of the Indices of Social Development

In recent years, international organizations, think-tanks, and the social sciences have contributed to a dramatic expansion in the range of composite indices measuring concepts such as human development, governance, or social capital. This paper discusses challenges faced in the design of composite indices, and suggests the method known as matching pe

Well-being increased during the first UK lockdown – but not for everyone

Sam Gilbert, Mark Fabian, and Roberto Foa draw on data from the first UK lockdown to illustrate how well-being levels improved, contrary to what may have been expected. They nevertheless explain that such improvements were not evenly distributed among the population and discuss the policy implications of their findings

Social Institutions as a Form of Intangible Capital

In recent years there has been growing interest in including estimates of "intangible" capital, such as knowledge, skills, and institutions, in national asset accounting. In accordance with these efforts, this paper attempts to provide the first worldwide evaluations of "social" institutions, understood as the norms and networks that reduce transaction costs and enable collec

Ancient Polities, Modern States

Political science is concerned with the study of polities. However, remarkably few scholars are familiar with the polities of the premodern era, such as Vijayanagara, Siam, Abyssinia, the Kingdoms of Kongo or Mutapa, or the Mysore or Maratha empires. This dissertation examines the legacies of precolonial polities in India, during the period from 1707 to 1857. I argue that, contrary to the widespread perception that the Indian subcontinent was a pre-state society, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were a time of rapid defensive modernization across the subcontinent, driven by the requirements of gunpowder weaponry and interstate warfare among South Asian regimes and against European colonial powers. These changes included the broadening and deepening of the tax base, consolidation of territorial control, reorganization of domestic militaries to use infantry and gunpowder weapons, rationalization of the administration through use of accounts and printed records, and the professionalization and functional differentiation of the executive branch. I then trace the boundaries of precolonial eighteenth-century South Asian polities, in order to show that districts of India that lie narrowly within the boundary lines of historically centralized states perform significantly better today on a wide variety of district-level indicators of state effectiveness than those narrowly outside these boundaries, despite the fact that these borders largely ceased to exist in the early nineteenth century. These estimated effects are robust to a wide variety of controls, placebo tests for border displacement, the exclusion of individual polities, and controls for the boundaries of India’s contemporary federal states. I verify the persistent legacy of precolonial states using a combination of archival research, district-level colonial data on taxation and public goods from 1853 to 1901, and a field test of bureaucratic responsiveness conducted in the state of Karnataka. Using extensive archival research on the fiscal and bureaucratic structure of Indian states in the eighteenth century, I show that following the decline of the Mughal Empire, warfare between “challenger states” prompted an accumulation of bureaucratic and fiscal capacity at the local level, and that this capacity has persisted through the colonial era to the present day. In contrast to “bottom-up” theories of state capacity which root institutional strength in societal characteristics such as ethnic homogeneity, social capital, or land equality, it is argued that government effectiveness is cumulatively built through long-term historical investments in state capacity, and that, in India, an important phase of investment occurred during the warring states period of the eighteenth century. Finally, I show that this relationship exists beyond the South Asian context, both in cross-country regressions of the effect of state antiquity on contemporary state capacity, and by conducting a subnational historical analysis within districts of the Former Soviet Union. I conclude that augmenting the state’s power to tax, regulate, or conscript is, in Weber’s phrase, “a long and slow boring of hard boards”, and the resources required in order to attain a functioning state - bureaucratic infrastructure, norms of compliance, and affective loyalty - are accumulated only very gradually. Yet where long-extant political regimes were successful in monitoring, coercing, and mobilizing citizens towards state goals they generate a reservoir of legitimacy and compliance, that is essential for making states work in the world today.Governmen