Virus, Violence and (In)Visible Women: #LockDownMeinLockUp and Embodied Resistance During COVID-19

Drawing on the #LockDownMeinLockUp visual campaign against domestic violence, this paper conceptually leverages embodied resistance, performed connectivity, and (in)visibility politics to explore how gender, body, power, affect, celebrity, performance, and injustice are framed by digital media in the context of an unprecedented global health crisis. The forms, forces, and incidences of domestic violence (DV) are rooted in local power relations and unique cultural practices and so should their interventions and representations be. Since the March 2020 lockdown, the pandemic worsened the conditions of DV victims in India. Many women were forced to cohabit with abusive partners and families. Data on the frequency of violence against women (VAW) in India confirms that reported cases of DV increased 131% by May 2020 in areas with strict lockdown mandates. Media coverage has also prioritized the health and economic implications of COVID-19, and little notice has been given to the impact of the pandemic on Indian women and their daily and layered oppressions. At this juncture, select NGOs, digital platforms, and celebrities have taken to advocating against the abuse that Indian women are facing during the pandemic, of which the Instagram hashtivism #LockDownMeinLockUp is a potent exemplar. Based on an inductive thematic analysis of 1,624 Instagram images (May-December 2020) related to the #LockDownMeinLockUp hashtivism, its celebrity selfies, and digital posters, this study reveals four themes relating to representations of and interventions against DV on Indian women during the pandemic, including: (1) names, stories, and victim visibility; (2) violence visuals; (3) celebrity selfie-resistance; and (4) action, connection, and transformation. In offering visual immediacy, connective visibility, and affective mobilization against DV amidst India’s lockdown, the #LockDownMeinLockUp campaign surfaces as a tool of localized activism. The short-term material impact is the digital campaign’s success in fundraising for DV interventions and peri- and post-pandemic care and safety measures for many abused women. Yet, its enduring impact is contingent on how much is yet to be done on a structural level to address India’s sweeping gender inequities, victim invisibility, sources, and symptoms that intersectionally exacerbate the endemic of violence against women

Who Is a Stream? Epistemic Communities, Instrument Constituencies and Advocacy Coalitions in Public Policy-Making

John Kingdon’s Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) was articulated in order to better understand how issues entered onto policy agendas, using the concept of policy actors interacting over the course of sequences of events in what he referred to as the “problem”, “policy” and “politics” “streams”. However, it is not a priori certain who the agents are in this process and how they interact with each other. As was common at the time, in his study Kingdon used an undifferentiated concept of a “policy subsystem” to group together and capture the activities of various policy actors involved in this process. However, this article argues that the policy world Kingdon envisioned can be better visualized as one composed of distinct subsets of actors who engage in one specific type of interaction involved in the definition of policy problems: either the articulation of problems, the development of solutions, or their enactment. Rather than involve all subsystem actors, this article argues that three separate sets of actors are involved in these tasks: epistemic communities are engaged in discourses about policy problems; instrument constituencies define policy alternatives and instruments; and advocacy coalitions compete to have their choice of policy alternatives adopted. Using this lens, the article focuses on actor interactions involved both in the agenda-setting activities Kingdon examined as well as in the policy formulation activities following the agenda setting stage upon which Kingdon originally worked. This activity involves the definition of policy goals (both broad and specific), the creation of the means and mechanisms to realize these goals, and the set of bureaucratic, partisan, electoral and other political struggles involved in their acceptance and transformation into action. Like agenda-setting, these activities can best be modeled using a differentiated subsystem approach

Designing policies in uncertain contexts: Entrepreneurial capacity and the case of the European Emission Trading Scheme

The paper focuses on enterprising agents in policy formulation and design by looking at their capacity of dealing with different levels of uncertainty. In climate policy specifically, different degrees and types of uncertainties pose a challenge to policymakers. Policy entrepreneurs and the combination of their analytical, operational and political compe- tences are a relevant component in reducing ambiguity in policy design and translating broad policy goals to operational programmes and specific policy instruments. Using the case of the European Emission Trading Scheme, we suggest that the success of policy entrepreneurs in catalysing policy change is determined by their capacity to work against multiple kinds of uncertainty. This ‘uncertainty mitigating’ capacity on the part of policy entrepreneurs rests significantly on balancing managerial expertise and political acumen. We conclude that entrepreneurial capacity goes beyond current definitions in the literature, involving the balance among analytical, operational and political compe- tences to navigate a politicized policy context.

Behavioural Insights Teams (BITs) and policy change: An exploration of impact, location, and temporality of policy advice

Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier

Death and Digi-memorials: Perimortem and Postmortem Memory Sharing through Transitional Social Networking

Impending death and the event of passing can leave one in a state beyond bereavement, leading to a penchant for rationalizing the entire process. Increasingly people turn to social media not only as a community of mourners who come together to share their grief, but also to create chronicles of hope for the deceased’s life-before-death through acts of sharing emotional narratives, prayers of faith, as well as relational visuals awaiting the passing away. These digital networking communities have displayed the power to hold onto the fleeting. Social media possess an inherent quality of conceptual permanence that make them transitional public conduits for talking about the possibility of miracles to halt imminent death, fluidly followed by discussions of the transience of life. This essay critically evaluates extant literature on peri- and postmortem research with a focus on how the transitional narrative of sustaining hope and shared grieving is said to have been created on social network sites. We argue that digital acts of sharing prayers and intimate memories during the transitional phase (the period connecting the before and after mortem phases of a loved one) as done within social networking sites such as Facebook, conflates and complicates our accepted notions of social presence by reinforcing the digital enactment of what people do in offline grieving spaces

The Elements of Effective Program Design: A Two-Level Analysis

Politics and Governance221-1

Prioritizing Sustainability: Coalitions, Learning and Change Surrounding Biodiesel Policy Instruments in Indonesia

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Designing for sustainable outcomes: Espousing behavioral change into co-production programs

This paper uses a policy design perspective with which to examine the formulation of programmes that are based on the concept of co-production. In doing so, the paper reviews essential literature on policy design and co-production to identify that a limited focus on outcomes and specifically how behavioural change can make these outcomes sustainable represents a major gap in the current discussion of co-production. We firstly argue that in designing programmes involving co-production, outcomes need to be considered at the initial design stages where broad policy objectives are being defined. Secondly, we argue that for these outcomes to be sustainable, behavioural change on the part of policy targets needs to be an important objective of a coproduction programme. To illustrate our point, we use the example of rural sanitation programmes from three developing countries to specifically demonstrate how the absence or inclusion of behavioural change considerations in the early phases of policy design can elicit different levels of success in achieving desired policy outcomes

Behavioral instruments in renewable energy and the role of big data: A policy perspective

There has been a surge in the application of behavioral insights for environmental policymaking. It is often presented as an easy and low-cost intervention to alter individual behavior. However, there is limited insight into the cost effectiveness of these attempts and the impact of inserting behavioral policy instruments into an existing mix of traditional tools in a particular policy sector. Furthermore, there has been little focus on the intersection of large behavioral datasets and how they could complement behavioral insights. We present a conceptual overview of how the intersection of big data and behavioral knowledge would work in the renewable energy sector. We indicate that inserting behavioral insights into the energy instrument mix is complex due to technological trajectories, path dependencies and resistance from incumbent industries to change production patterns. We also highlight the underutilized role of large behavioral datasets that can inform not only policy implementation, but also policy design and evaluation efforts. Drawing on these findings, we introduce future research streams of government capacity in combining behavioral insights and data, the compatibility of this information with existing policy instruments and how this affects policy change.The politics and administration of institutional chang