Perspectives on European integration: a British view

Content: Europe's Opportunity; Institutions, Economics, Foreign Policy; Britain and German

FUKUYAMA E A ALTERNATIVA SOCIALISTA

FUKUYAMA, Francis. O fim da história e o último homem. Rio de Janeiro, Rocco, 1992

Choice and Voice in Personalised Learning

David Miliband, UK Schools Standards Minister at the time of the London personalisation conference, presents his vision and policy agenda for personalisation of learning. He outlines five components of personalised learning to guide policy development. i) It needs assessment for learning and the use of data and dialogue to diagnose every student’s learning needs. ii) It calls for the development of the competence and confidence of each learner through teaching and learning strategies which build on individual needs. iii) It presupposes curriculum choice which engages and respects students. iv) It demands a radical approach to school organisation and class organisation based around student progress. v) Personalised learning means the community, local institutions and social services supporting schools to drive forward progress in the classroom. He develops the importance of the concepts of “choice ” and “voice ” as fundament to the personalisation agenda. This conference comes at an absolutely key time for public services in Britain. I do not believe it is an exaggeration to say it is the most important time for public services since the creation of the welfare state after 1945. Now, as then, the power of collective action is being tested: to liberate individual potential, or to be damned for costing too much and delivering too little. The Government fought the 2001 election on its commitment to public services. Since then, change has been consistent. Investment has neve

Transitions from school to work : comparing policies and choosing options for vocational education and training

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1990.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 134-144).by David Wright Miliband.M.S

Behaviour change in the UK climate debate : an assessment of responsibility, agency and political dimensions

This paper explores the politics around the role of agency in the UK climate change debate. Government interventions on the demand side of consumption have increasingly involved attempts to obtain greater traction with the values, attitudes and beliefs of citizens in relation to climate change and also in terms of influencing consumer behaviour at an individual level. With figures showing that approximately 40% of the UK’s carbon emissions are attributable to household and transport behaviour, policy initiatives have progressively focused on the facilitation of “sustainable behaviours”. Evidence suggests however, that mobilisation of pro-environmental attitudes in addressing the perceived “value-action gap” has so far had limited success. Research in this field suggests that there is a more significant and nuanced “gap” between context and behaviour; a relationship that perhaps provides a more adroit reflection of reasons why people do not necessarily react in the way that policy-makers anticipate. Tracing the development of the UK Government’s behaviour change agenda over the last decade, we posit that a core reason for the limitations of this programme relates to an excessively narrow focus on the individual. This has served to obscure some of the wider political and economic aspects of the debate in favour of a more simplified discussion. The second part of the paper reports findings from a series of focus groups exploring some of the wider political views that people hold around household energy habits, purchase and use of domestic appliances, and transport behaviour-and discusses these insights in relation to the literature on the agenda’s apparent limitations. The paper concludes by considering whether the aims of the Big Society approach (recently established by the UK’s Coalition Government) hold the potential to engage more directly with some of these issues or whether they merely constitute a “repackaging” of the individualism agenda

Capital United? Business Unity in Regulatory Politics and the Special Place of Finance

While organized business is a key actor in regulatory politics, its influence is often conditional on the level of unity or conflict occurring within the business community at any given time. Most contemporary regulatory policy interventions put pressure on normal mechanisms of business unity, since they are highly targeted and sector-specific. This raises the question of how business unity operates across a highly variegated economic terrain in which costs are asymmetric and free-riding incentives are high. In the paper we empirically assess patterns of business unity within regulatory policymaking across different regulated sectors. Our analysis utilizes data from hundreds of regulatory policy proposals, and business community reactions to them in the telecommunications, energy, agriculture, pharmaceutical and financial sectors over a variety of institutional contexts. We find considerable empirical support for the ‘finance capital unity’ hypothesis – the notion that the financial sector enjoys more business unity than do other regulated sectors of the economy. When the financial sector is faced with new regulations, business groups from other sectors frequently come to its aid

Comfort radicalism and NEETs: a conservative praxis

Young people who are not in education, employment or training (NEET) are construed by policy makers as a pressing problem about which something should be done. Such young people's lack of employment is thought to pose difficulties for wider society in relation to social cohesion and inclusion and it is feared that they will become a 'lost generation'. This paper(1) draws upon English research, seeking to historicise the debate whilst acknowledging that these issues have a much wider purchase. The notion of NEETs rests alongside longstanding concerns of the English state and middle classes, addressing unruly male working class youth as well as the moral turpitude of working class girls. Waged labour and domesticity are seen as a means to integrate such groups into society thereby generating social cohesion. The paper places the debate within it socio-economic context and draws on theorisations of cognitive capitalism, Italian workerism, as well as emerging theories of antiwork to analyse these. It concludes by arguing that ‘radical’ approaches to NEETs that point towards inequities embedded in the social structure and call for social democratic solutions veer towards a form of comfort radicalism. Such approaches leave in place the dominance of capitalist relations as well as productivist orientations that celebrate waged labour