Global Health Research Center of Central Asia
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Red Mining: Mining and the Right to Water in Porgera, Papua New Guinea
Get PDFThe Porgera Joint Venture (PJV) gold mine in the highlands of Papua New Guinea (PNG) has been one of the world’s highest producing gold mines over the course of its quarter-century history, and has accounted for a considerable percentage of PNG’s economic income. Yet many Porgeran residents live in deplorable conditions and feel trapped by the mine. Where they once farmed vegetables and collected fresh water from natural streams, they now see ever-expanding waste dumps. For years, security guards at the mine physically abused many residents, including sexually assaulting and gang-raping Porgeran women. 3 Residents feel the earth shake with recurring explosions from the mine operations, and worry about landslides threatening their homes and gardens. They see the rivers change color with the addition of mine waste and chemicals, smell the strong odor of industrial chemicals permeating their environment, and worry about the impact of these chemicals on their environment and health. Porgerans watch the white vapor from the mill join the clouds and have concerns about its impact on the rain that they collect to drink and water their gardens. They also hear the noise and feel the dust from trucks moving massive quantities of rock and waste at all hours of the day. The expectations of socio-economic development originally associated with the establishment of the mine have not been met for much of the Porgeran population, fostering feelings of injustice and disillusionment. With limited jobs available for Porgerans from the mine itself, and few other employment opportunities present, many residents struggle to earn enough money to survive. Many try to make a living by searching in the mine’s waste for scraps of gold left over from mine processes, or entering the open pit and risking serious injury.
This report seeks to support Porgeran communities in their efforts to secure their human rights, and the PNG government in its commitment to advancing the human right to water and its efforts to sustainably improve the quality of life in PNG through improved access to water. This report also seeks to support the mining companies to fulfil their responsibilities to respect the right to water and in meeting their goals as sustainable development partners in PNG.
This report is the product of an interdisciplinary and mixed-methods investigation of the right to water and interrelated rights in the residential areas adjacent to the PJV gold mine. The study was carried out in response to serious concerns expressed by residents over many years about the adequacy and safety of water in their area, and about the mine’s impacts on their environment
Persistent Regulations: A Detailed Assessment of the Trump Administration\u27s Efforts to Repeal Federal Climate Regulations
Get PDFThis paper takes a critical look at what the Trump administration has actually accomplished in terms of repealing and modifying greenhouse gas emission standards and otherwise advancing its pro-fossil fuel agenda. As detailed herein and summarized in Figures 1 and 2, the scope of the efforts taken pursuant to this agenda is extremely broad – there are dozens of different deregulatory actions underway at various agencies, most notably the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). But in most cases, the pace of these efforts has been quite slow. This is particularly true for efforts to repeal or revise major regulations like the Clean Power Plan and the motor vehicle greenhouse gas emission and fuel economy standards, as the administration must adhere to notice-and-comment procedures and must also justify any changes to these rules in light of the statutory provisions it is implementing
Police Contact and the Legal Socialization of Urban Teens
Get PDFContemporary American policing has routinized involuntary police contacts with young people through frequent, sometimes intrusive investigative stops. Personal experience with the police has the potential to corrode adolescents’ relationships with law and skew law-related behaviors. We use the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate how adolescents’ experiences with the police shape their legal socialization. We find that both personal and vicarious police contact are associated with increased legal cynicism. Associations are present across racial groups and are not explained by teens’ behaviors, school settings, or family backgrounds. Legal cynicism is amplified in teens reporting intrusive contact but diminished among teens reporting experiences characterized by procedural justice. Our findings suggest that aggressive policing risks weakening teens’ deference to law and legal authorities
The Department of Defense Office of Inspector General’s Seven Key Principles for Improving Our Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey Scores
Get PDFEvery year, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) surveys employees throughout the federal government on how they view their organizations. This survey, called the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey, or FedView Survey, asks federal employees a variety of questions about their views of their organization, managers, supervisors, and senior leaders; whether the employees believe they have the training and tools they need to do their jobs; overall how satisfied they are with their organization; and several other important questions related to employee engagement. The Partnership for Public Service then analyzes the results of the survey and ranks the government organizations on employee engagement, as reflected by these scores
Building a Good Jobs Economy
Get PDFConventional models are failing throughout the world. In the developed world, the welfare state-compensation model has been in retrenchment for some time, and the drawbacks of the neoliberal conception that has superseded it are increasingly evident. Yet there is no compelling alternative on offer. In the developing world, the conventional, tried-and-tested model of industrialization has run out of steam. In both sets of societies a combination of technological and economic forces (in particular, globalization) is creating or exacerbating productive/technological dualism, with a segment of advanced production in metropolitan areas that thrives on the uncertainty generated by the knowledge economy co-existing with a mass of relatively less productive activities and communities that neither contributes to nor benefits from innovation. The sizes of these two sectors and the trajectories leading into them may vary, but otherwise the nature of the underlying problem seems to have converged in the developed and developing worlds
Jurisdiction Stripping Circa 2020: What \u3cem\u3eThe Dialogue\u3c/em\u3e (Still) Has to Teach Us
Get PDFSince its publication in 1953, Henry Hart’s famous article, The Power of Congress to Limit the Jurisdiction of Federal Courts: An Exercise in Dialectic, subsequently referred to as simply “The Dialogue,” has served as the leading scholarly treatment of congressional control over the federal courts. Now in its seventh decade, much has changed since Hart first wrote. This Article examines what lessons The Dialogue still holds for its readers circa 2020
Three by Posner
Get PDFIf Richard Posner did not invent the term “efficient breach,” he at least was its most aggressive marketer. I confess that nowadays I do not find the concept particularly useful, but that does not detract from its value. It was a catalyst, forcing scholars to consider the economic function of contract remedies. Any assessment of Judge Posner’s contracts jurisprudence must acknowledge that contribution.
In this paper, I will consider three of his opinions that appear with some regularity in contracts casebooks – Northern Indiana Public Service Company v. Carbon County Coal Company, Empire Gas v. American Bakeries, and Lake River v. Carborundum. To anticipate my conclusions, in the first I find his analysis and conclusions to be right (with one tiny quibble). In the second, I find his conclusion on liability correct, given the statute. I believe he could have been more aggressive on the remedy issue. Still, I cannot conclude that he was wrong. On the third, I conclude that he got the outcome wrong and made a number of other errors along the way
The Data Standardization Challenge
Get PDFData standardization offers significant benefits for industry and regulators alike, suggesting that it should be easy. In practice, however, the process has been difficult and slow moving. Moving from an abstract incentive-based analysis to one focused on institutional detail reveals myriad frictions favoring the status quo despite foregone gains. This paper explores the benefits of and challenges confronting standardization, why it should be a top regulatory priority, and how to overcome some of the obstacles to implementation.
The paper also uses data standardization as a lens into the challenges that impede optimal financial regulation. Alongside capture and other common explanations for regulatory failures, this paper suggests that coordination problems, delayed benefits, and other banal, but perhaps no less intractable, challenges are often the real impediments to better financial regulation
Economic Democracy and Enterprise Form in Finance
Get PDFThis article considers the relative advantages of alternative enterprise forms in finance from the point of view of public accountability. The business corporation is compared to the state agency or authority, the cooperative, the state corporation, and the charitable nonprofit. These forms can be distinguished according to whether they aspire to enhance general electoral democracy or stakeholder democracy and whether their democratic controls operate directly or indirectly. The article suggests that the indirect democratic forms may be more promising than the direct ones. It also argues that the project of democratizing finance depends on the development of practices of multifactor or “dialogic” performance assessment. Such practices must be institutionalized through public or private organizations that extend across firms
A Skeptical View of Information Fiduciaries
Get PDFThe concept of “information fiduciaries” has surged to the forefront of debates on online-platform regulation. Developed by Professor Jack Balkin, the concept is meant to rebalance the relationship between ordinary individuals and the digital companies that accumulate, analyze, and sell their personal data for profit. Just as the law imposes special duties of care, confidentiality, and loyalty on doctors, lawyers, and accountants vis-à-vis their patients and clients, Balkin argues, so too should it impose special duties on corporations such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter vis-à-vis their end users. Over the past several years, this argument has garnered remarkably broad support and essentially zero critical pushback.
This Article seeks to disrupt the emerging consensus by identifying a number of lurking tensions and ambiguities in the theory of information fiduciaries, as well as a number of reasons to doubt the theory’s capacity to resolve them satisfactorily. Although we agree with Balkin that the harms stemming from dominant online platforms call for legal intervention, we question whether the concept of information fiduciaries is an adequate or apt response to the problems of information insecurity that he stresses, much less to more fundamental problems associated with outsized market share and business models built on pervasive surveillance. We also call attention to the potential costs of adopting an information-fiduciary framework – a framework that, we fear, invites an enervating complacency toward online platforms’ structural power and a premature abandonment of more robust visions of public regulation